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CHAPTER
21
INDUSTRIAL EUROPE
PORTRAIT OF AN AGE
THE RAILROAD
THE
VISUAL
RECORD
came trips, and the travel holiday was born. Commerce was
transformed, as was the way in which it was conducted.
Large quantities of goods could be shipped quickly from
place to place; orders could instantly be filled. The whole
notion of locality changed, as salesmen could board a morning train for what only recently had been an unreachable
market. Branch offices could be overseen by regional directors, services and products could be standardized, and the
gap between great and small cities and between town and
countryside could be narrowed.
Wherever they went, the railroads created links that had
never been forged before. In Britain, the railroad schedule led
to the creation of official time. Trains that left London were
scheduled to arrive at their destinations according to London
time, which was now kept at the royal observatory in
Greenwich. Trains carried fresh fish inland from the coasts
and fresh vegetables from rural farms to city tables. Mail
moved farther and more quickly; news spread more evenly.
Fashionable ideas from the capital cities of Europe circulated
everywhere, as did new knowledge and discoveries. The railroads brought both diversity and uniformity.
They also brought wonderment. The engine seemed to
propel itself with unimaginable power and at breathtaking
speed. The English actress Fanny Kemble (1809–1893) captured the sensation memorably: “You can’t imagine how
strange it seemed to be journeying on thus, without any visible cause of progress other than the magical machine, with its
flying white breath and rhythmical, unvarying pace. I felt no
fairy tale was ever half so wonderful as what I saw.” For many,
the railroad symbolized the genius of the age in which they
were living, an age in which invention, novelty, and progress
were everywhere to be seen. It combined the great innovations of steam, coal, and iron that were transforming nearly
every aspect of ordinary life. But for others, the railway was
just as much a symbol of disquiet, of the passing of a way of
life that was easier to understand and to control. “Seated in
the old mail-coach we needed no evidence out of ourselves to
indicate the velocity,” wrote the English author Thomas De
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The Normandy train has reached Paris. The coast and the
capital are once again connected. Passengers in their city finery disembark and are greeted by others who have awaited
their scheduled arrival. Workmen stand ready to unload
freight, porters to carry luggage. Steam billows forth from the
resting engine, which is the object of all human activity. The
engine stares as enigmatically as any character in a
Renaissance portrait. Yet the train that has arrived in La Gare
Saint-Lazare by Claude Monet (1840–1926)
is as much the central character in this portrait of the industrial age as was any individual in portraits of ages past.
The train’s iron bulk dwarfs the people
around it. Indeed, iron dominates; tons of it
are in view. The rails, the lampposts, the
massive frame of the station, no less than the train itself, are
all formed from iron—pliable, durable, inexpensive iron—the
miracle product of industrialization. The iron station with its
glass panels became as central a feature of nineteenth-century
cities as stone cathedrals were in the Middle Ages. Railway stations changed the shape of urban settings, just as railway
travel changed the lives of millions of people.
There had never been anything like it before. Ancient
Romans had hitched four horses to their chariots; nineteenthcentury Europeans hitched four horses to their stagecoaches.
The technology of overland transportation had hardly
changed in 2000 years. Coach journeys were long, uncomfortable, and expensive, and they were governed by the elements
and muddy, rutted roads that caused injuries to humans and
horses with alarming regularity. First-class passengers rode
inside, where they were jostled against one another and
breathed the dust that the horses kicked up in front of them.
Second-class passengers rode on top, braving the elements
and risking life and limb in an accident.
Railway travel was a quantum leap forward. It was faster,
cheaper, and safer. Overnight it changed conceptions of
time, space, and, above all, speed. People could journey to
what once were distant places in a single day. Voyages be-
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Claude Monet, Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877
Quincey (1785–1859) in his obituary for the passing of horse
travel. “We heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it. This speed
was not the product of blind, insensate agencies, that had no
sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of
the noblest among brutes.”
The fruits of the railways, like the fruits of industrialization, were not all sweet. As the nineteenth century progressed,
there could be no doubt that, year by year, one way of life was
being replaced by another. More and more laborers were leaving the farms for the factories; more and more products were
being made by machines. Everywhere there was change, but it
was not always or everywhere for the better. Millions of people poured into cities that mushroomed up without plan or
intention. Population growth, factory labor, and ultimately
the grinding poverty that they produced overwhelmed traditional means of social control. Families and communities split
apart; the expectations of ordinary people were no longer predictable. Life was spinning out of control for individuals,
groups, and even whole societies. It was an engine racing
down a track that only occasionally ended as placidly as did
the Normandy train at the Gare Saint-Lazare.
LOOKING AHEAD
As this chapter will discuss, industrialization began in Great
Britain, spurred by its mineral wealth and entrepreneurial skill. It
was the result of changes in agricultural practices that allowed
for a larger population to be supported by fewer farmers. It was
powered first by coal and its use in the production of iron and
then by steam that allowed for powerful engines to mechanize
production. The steam engines also allowed for a revolution in
transportation as seen in the painting of the Gare Saint-Lazare.
Industrialization transformed every aspect of the British economy and soon spread throughout Europe.
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Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
CHAPTER OUTLINE
■
THE TRADITIONAL ECONOMY
Farming Families Rural Manufacture
Revolution
■
■
The Agricultural
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN
Britain First Minerals and Metals Cotton Is King The
Iron Horse Entrepreneurs and Managers The Wages of
Progress
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE CONTINENT
France: Industrialization Without Revolution Germany:
Industrialization and Union The Lands That Time Forgot
■
■
THE TRADITIONAL ECONOMY
Farming Families
Over most of Europe, agricultural activity in the eighteenth
century followed methods of crop rotation that had been in
place for more than a thousand years. Fields were divided into
strips of land, and each family “owned” a certain number of
strips, which they cultivated for their livelihood. Between
one-half and one-third of village land lay fallow each year so
that its nutrients could be restored. Open-field farming, as the
system was called, was communal rather than individual.
Decisions about which crops to grow in the productive fields,
where animals would be pastured, or how much wood could
be cut from the common wastes affected everyone. Moreover,
many activities, such as plowing, gleaning, and manuring,
could not conveniently observe the distinctions of ownership
of separate strips. Nor, given the realities of nature, could individual families be self-sustaining without the services of a
village tanner or milkmaid or hog minder drawn from the
closely intertwined group of kin and neighbors that consti-
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
The curse of Adam and Eve was that they would earn their
daily bread by the sweat of their brows. For generation after
generation, age after age, economic life was dominated by toil.
Man, woman, and child labored to secure their supply of food
against the caprice of nature. There was nothing even vaguely
romantic about the backbreaking exertion needed to crack
open the hard ground, plant seeds in it, and protect the crops
from the ravages of insects, birds, and animals long enough to
be harvested. Every activity was labor-intensive. Wood for
shelter or fuel was chopped with thick, blunt axes. Water was
drawn from deep wells by the long, slow turn of a crank or
dragged in buckets from the nearest stream. Everything that
was consumed was pulled or pushed or lifted. French women
carried soil and water up steep terraces in journeys that could
take as long as seven hours. “The women seemed from their
persons and features to be harder worked than horses,” Arthur
Young (1741–1820), the English agricultural expert, observed
with a combination of admiration and disgust. The capital
that was invested in the traditional economy was human capital, and by the middle of the eighteenth century nearly eight
out of every ten Europeans still tilled the soil, earning their
bread by the sweat of their brow.
Although the traditional economy was dominated by agriculture, an increasing amount of labor was devoted to manufacture. The development of a secure and expanding overseas
trade created a worldwide demand for consumer goods. In
the countryside, small domestic textile industries grew up.
Families would take in wool for spinning and weaving to supplement their income from agriculture. When times were
good, they would expend proportionately less effort in manufacturing; when times were bad, they would expend more.
Their tasks were set by an entrepreneur who provided raw
materials and paid the workers by the piece. Wages paid to
rural workers were lower than those paid to urban laborers
because they were not subject to guild restrictions and because the wages supplemented farm income. Thus entrepreneurs could profit from lower costs, although they had to bear
the risk that the goods produced in that fashion would be of
lesser quality or that markets would dry up in the interval.
Although domestic industry increased the supply of manufactured commodities, it demanded even more labor from an already overworked sector of the traditional economy.
Throughout the traditional economy, the limits on
progress were set by nature. Good harvests brought prosperity, bad harvests despair. Over the long run, the traditional
economy ran in all-too-predictable cycles. Sadly, the adage,
“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die,” was
good advice. Prosperity was sure to bring misery in its train.
The good fortune of one generation was the hard luck of the
next, as more people competed for a relatively fixed quantity
of food. No amount of sweat and muscle and, as yet, ingenuity could rescue the traditional economy from its pendulum
swings of boom and bust.
By the eighteenth century, the process that would ultimately transform the traditional economy was already under
way. It began with the agricultural revolution, one of the
great turning points in human history. Before it occurred, the
life of every community and of every citizen was always held
hostage to nature. The struggle to secure an adequate food
supply was the dominant fact of life to which nearly all productive labor was dedicated. After the agricultural revolution,
an inadequate food supply was a political rather than an economic fact of life. Fewer and fewer farmers were required to
feed more and more people. In Britain, where nearly 70 percent of the population was engaged in agriculture at the end
of the seventeenth century, fewer than 2 percent today work
on farms. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the most
advanced economies were capable of producing vast surpluses
of basic commodities. The agricultural revolution was not an
event, and it did not happen suddenly. It would not deserve
the label “revolution” at all were it not for its momentous consequences: Europe’s escape from the shackles of the traditional economy.
The Traditional Economy
621
potatoes in the mistaken belief that
they caused leprosy. Yet both potatoes and corn became peasant
Percentage
crops and spread rapidly throughincrease
out southern Europe, not least beOver 80
cause as new commodities they
60 – 79
were untaxed. Peasants bartered
their surplus, hoarded their profits,
40 – 59
and took what few advantages they
NORWAY
could out of a system in which the
20 – 39
AND
deck was stacked against them.
SWEDEN
Under 20
As the European population entered a new cycle of growth in the
North
second quarter of the eighteenth
Sea
century, the traditional economy
DENMARK
ic
t
began to increase agricultural prol
Ba
ductivity in traditional ways. In the
RUSSIAN EMPIRE
IA
GREAT
east, new lands were colonized and
S
PRUS
BRITAIN
POLAND
slowly brought under cultivation.
Frederick the Great welcomed imATLANTIC
migrants to Prussia, where land was
OCEAN
plentiful, if not very fertile. In setHABSBURG EMPIRE
tled communities, less productive
AUSTRIA
FRANCE
HUNGARY
land, which had provided fodder
for animals at the end of the sevenBlack
Sea
teenth century, now had to provide
ITALIAN
O
TT
food for humans. Scrubland was
STATES
OM
cleared and hillsides terraced. Dry
AN
EM
SPAIN
ground was irrigated manually by
PIR
E
women and children working in
bucket brigades. As always, an inMediterran
ean
GREECE
Se
crease in population initially meant
a
an increase in productivity. For a
time, more able-bodied workers
produced more food. In the half
century that ended in the 1770s,
French peasants increased agricultural production by nearly 60 perPopulation Growth in Europe, 1800–1850
cent. The intensification of tradiNotice which parts of Europe experienced the largest growth in populational methods rather than
tion in the first half of the nineteenth century. Compare the rate of
innovation accounted for the inpopulation growth in Spain and Norway and Sweden. Which grew
crease. The number of strips held
faster? In which parts of Europe did the population increase the most
by each family declined, but each
during this period? What impact would you expect such growth to have
strip was more carefully cultivated.
on the agricultural economy? On the rate of industrialization?
By the end of the eighteenth
century, the European population
was reaching the point at which
tuted the community. Communal agriculture was effective,
another check on its growth might be expected. Between 1700
but it also limited the number of people that could survive on
and 1800, total European population had increased by nearly
the produce from a given amount of land.
50 percent, and the rate of growth was continuing to accelerAgriculture was a profoundly conservative occupation, for
ate. The vast expansion of rural population placed a grave
the risk of experimentation was nothing less than survival.
strain on agricultural production. Decade by decade, more
Lords and peasants both practiced defensive innovation, introfamilies attempted to eke out an existence from the same
ducing change only after its practical benefits were easily
amount of land. The gains made by intensive cultivation were
demonstrable. For example, in the mid-seventeenth century
now lost to overpopulation. In areas that practiced partible
two French provincial parlements banned the cultivation of
inheritance, farms were subdivided into units too small to
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
PO
RTU
GA
L
S
ea
MAP DISCOVERY
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
622
Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
provide subsistence. Competition for the “morsels” of land, as
the French called them, was intense. Older sons bought out
younger brothers; better-off families purchased whatever
came on the market to prevent their children from slipping
into poverty. Even in areas in which primogeniture was the
rule, portions for younger sons and daughters ate into the
meager inheritance of the eldest son. Over much of Europe, it
was becoming increasingly difficult to live by bread alone.
Rural Manufacture
The crisis of overpopulation meant that not only were there
more mouths to feed, there were more bodies to clothe. That
increased the need for spun and woven cloth, and thus for
spinners and weavers. Traditionally, commercial cloth production was the work of urban artisans, but the expansion of
the marketplace and the introduction of new fabrics, especially cotton and silk, had eroded the monopoly of most of
the clothing guilds. Merchants could sell as much finished
product as they could find, and the teeming rural population
provided a tempting pool of inexpensive labor for anyone
willing to risk the capital to purchase raw materials. Initially,
farming families took manufacturing work into their homes
to supplement their income. Spinning and weaving were the
■
The European Linen Industry. By the eighteenth century, linen production was dominated by the Low Countries and the north
German principalities where skilled labor could still be found for
the complicated process of linen weaving.
North
Sea
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
Commercial
linen centers
Rural
industry
Mediterranean
Sea
Intensive
Minor
Less intensive
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
Major
most common occupations, and they were treated as occasional work, reserved for the slow times in the agricultural cycle. This was known as cottage industry. It was side-employment, less important and less valuable than the vital
agricultural labor that all members of the family undertook.
But by the middle of the eighteenth century, cottage industry was developing in a new direction. As landholdings grew
smaller, even good harvests did not promise subsistence to
many families. The oversupply of labor was soon organized
into the putting-out system, which mobilized the resources
of the rural labor force for commercial production of large
quantities of manufactured goods. The characteristics of the
putting-out system were similar throughout Europe, whether
it was undertaken by individual entrepreneurs or lords of the
manor, or even sponsored by the state. The process began
with the capital of the entrepreneur, which was used to purchase raw materials. The materials were “put out” to the
homes of workers where the manufacture, most commonly
spinning or weaving, took place. The finished goods were returned to the entrepreneur, who sold them at a profit, with
which he bought raw materials to begin the process anew.
The simplicity of the putting-out system was one of its most
valuable features. All of its essential elements were already
present in rural communities. The small nest egg of a prosperous farmer or small trader was all the money needed to make
the first purchase of raw materials. The raw materials could be
put out to his kin or closest neighbors and the finished goods
then delivered to market along with surplus crops. Not only
could a small amount of cash begin the cycle of putting-out, but
that capital continued to circulate to keep the process in motion.
The small scale of the initial enterprise can be seen in the
fact that many entrepreneurs had themselves begun as workers. In Bohemia, for example, some of the largest putting-out
operations were run by serfs who paid their lords fees for the
right to engage in trade. At the end of the eighteenth century,
there were more than one-quarter million spinners in the
Bohemian linen industry alone, most of them organized into
small groups around a single entrepreneur, though one
monastery employed more than 650 women spinners.
Putting-out also required only a low level of skill and common, inexpensive tools. Rural families did their own spinning
and rural villages their own weaving. Thus, putting-out demanded little investment, either in plant, equipment, or education. Nor did it inevitably disrupt traditional gender-based
tasks in the family economy. In most places spinning was
women’s work, weaving was done by men, and children
helped at whichever task was under way. In fact, certain occupations, such as lacemaking in France, were so gender-based
that men would not even act as entrepreneurs. In Austria,
lacemaking was considered less honorable than other forms
of clothmaking because of its association with women and
household-based production. Performed at home, rural manufacture remained a traditional family-oriented occupation.
Gradually, the putting-out system came to dominate the
lives of many rural families. From small networks of isolated
The Traditional Economy
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623
Linen production is the subject of
this 1705 engraving by Franz Philipp
Florin. To make linen, it was necessary to soak the stems of the flax
plant to soften its tough outer
fibers, which were then removed by
beating. The more delicate inner
fibers were spun into thread, and
then were woven into linen cloth on
handlooms.
villages, domestic manufacture grew to cover entire regions.
Perhaps as many as one-quarter of the inhabitants of the Irish
province of Ulster were engaged in manufacturing linen by
the end of the eighteenth century. Spinning and weaving became full-time occupations for families that kept no more
than a small garden. But without agricultural earnings, piecework rates became starvation wages, and families unable to
purchase their subsistence were forced to rely upon loans
from the entrepreneurs who set them at work. Long hours in
dank cottages performing endlessly repetitive tasks became
the lot of millions of rural inhabitants, and their numbers increased annually. While the sons of farmers waited to inherit
land before they formed their families, the sons of cottage
weavers needed only a loom to begin theirs. They could afford
to marry younger and to have more children, for children
could contribute to manufacturing from an early age.
Consequently, the expansion of the putting-out system,
like the expansion of traditional agriculture, fueled the continued growth of population. Like traditional agriculture,
putting-out contained a number of structural inefficiencies.
Both entrepreneur and worker were potential victims of unscrupulousness. Embezzlement of raw materials was a problem for the entrepreneur, arbitrary wage cuts for the laborers.
Because the tasks were performed at home, the entrepreneur
could not supervise the work. Most disputes in domestic
manufacturing arose over specifications of quality. Workers
would not receive full pay for poorly produced goods that
could not be sold for full value. Inexperienced, aged, or infirm
workers could easily spoil costly raw materials. One
Bohemian nobleman created village spinning rooms on his
estates so that young girls could be given four weeks of train-
ing before they set up on their own. Finally, the putting-out
system was labor- rather than capital-intensive. As long as
there were ready hands to employ, there was little incentive to
seek better methods or more efficient techniques.
The Agricultural Revolution
The continued growth of Europe’s population necessitated an
expansion of agricultural output. In most places that was
achieved by intensifying traditional practices, bringing more
land into production and more labor to work the land. But in
the most advanced European economies, first in Holland and
then in England, traditional agriculture underwent a long but
dynamic transformation, an agricultural revolution. It was a
revolution of technique rather than technology. Humans were
not replaced by machines nor were new forms of energy substituted for human and animal muscle. Indeed, many of the
methods that were to increase crop yields had been known for
centuries and practiced during periods of population pressure. But they had never been practiced as systematically as
they came to be from the seventeenth century onward, and
they were never combined with a commercial attitude toward
farming. It was the willingness and ability of owners to invest
capital in their land that transformed subsistence farming
into commercial agriculture.
Enclosures. As long as farming was practiced in open
fields, there was little incentive for individual landowners to
invest in improvements to their scattered strips. Although the
community as a whole could enclose a small field or plant
some fodder crops for the animals, its ability to change
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
624
Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
IMAGE DISCOVERY
The Blacksmith’s Shop
Joseph Wright of Derby depicts a blacksmith working without
many of the technological advances of the eighteenth century. The smith is housed in an abandoned religious building,
most likely an old church. What clues in the background would
lead one to that conclusion? The image, as a whole, recalls an
oft-painted scene from Christianity involving figures gathered
around and bending over a source of light. Can you identify it?
Why would Joseph Wright have imitated depictions of that
foundational Christian event in painting a traditional English
blacksmith?
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
traditional practice was limited. In farming villages, even the
smallest landholder had rights in common lands, which were
jealously guarded. Rights in commons meant a place in the
community itself. Commercial agriculture was more suited to
large rather than small estates and was more successful when
the land could be utilized in response to market conditions
rather than to the necessities of subsistence.
The consolidation of estates along with the
enclosure of fields was thus the initial step toward change. It was a long-term process that
took many forms. In England, where it was to
become most advanced, enclosure was already
under way in the sixteenth century. Prosperous
families had long been consolidating their strips
in the open fields, and at some point the lord of
the manor and the members of the community
agreed to carve up the common fields and make
the necessary exchanges to consolidate everyone’s lands. Perhaps as much as three-quarters
of the arable land in England was enclosed by
agreement before 1760. Enclosure by agreement
did not mean that the breakup of the open-field
community was necessarily a harmonious
process. Riots preceding or following agreed enclosures were not uncommon.
Paradoxically, it was the middling rather
than the poorest villagers who had the most to
lose. The breakup of the commons initially gave
the poor more arable land from which to eke
out their subsistence, and few of them could afford to sacrifice present gain for future loss. The
smallholders were quickly bought out. It was
the middle-size holders who were squeezed
hardest. Although prosperous in communal
farming, those families did not have access to
the capital necessary to make agricultural improvements such as converting grass to grain
land or purchasing large amounts of fertilizer.
They could not compete in producing for the
market, and gradually they, too, disappeared
from the enclosed village. Their opposition to
enclosure by agreement led, in the eighteenth
century, to enclosure by act of Parliament.
Parliamentary enclosure was legislated by government, a government composed for the most
part of large landowners. A commission would
view the community’s lands and divide them,
usually by a prescribed formula. Between 1760
and 1815, more than 1.5 million acres of farmland were enclosed by act of Parliament. During
the late eighteenth century, the Prussian and
French governments emulated the practice by
ordering large tracts of land enclosed.
The enclosure of millions of acres of land
was one of the largest expenses of the new commercial agriculture. Hedging or fencing off the
land and plowing up the commons required extra labor beyond that necessary for basic agrarian activities. Thus many
who sold the small estates that they received on the breakup
of the commons remained in villages as agricultural laborers
or leaseholders. But they practiced a different form of farming. More and more agricultural activity became market-oriented. Single crops were sown in large enclosed fields and ex-
The Traditional Economy
■
Surveyors measure a field for land
enclosure. The enclosure movement
eliminated large areas of what had
formerly been communal land.
changed at market for the mixture of goods that previously
had been grown in the village. Market production turned attention from producing a balance of commodities to increasing the yield of a single one.
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625
Agricultural Innovations. The first innovation was the
widespread cultivation of fodder crops such as clover and
turnips. Crops like clover restore nutrients to the soil as they
grow, shortening the period in which land has to lie fallow.
Moreover, farm animals grazing on clover or feeding on
turnips return more manure to the land, further increasing its
productivity. Turnip cultivation had begun in Holland and
was brought to England in the sixteenth century. But it was
not until the late seventeenth century that Viscount Charles
“Turnip” Townsend (1675–1738) made turnip cultivation
popular. Townsend and other large Norfolk landowners developed a new system of planting known as the four-crop rotation, in which wheat, turnips, barley, and clover succeeded
one another. The method kept the land in productive use, and
both the turnip and clover crops were used to feed larger
herds of animals.
The ability of farmers to increase their livestock was as important as their ability to grow more grain. Not only were
horses and oxen more productive than humans—a horse
could perform seven times the labor of a man while consuming only five times the food—but the animals also refertilized
the land as they worked. Light fertilization of a single acre of
arable land required an average of 25,000 pounds of manure.
But animals competed with humans for food, especially during the winter months when little grazing was possible. To
conserve grain for human consumption, lambs were led to the
slaughter and the fatted calf was killed in the autumn. Thus
the development of the technique of meadow floating was a
remarkable breakthrough. By flooding low-lying land near
streams in the winter, English and Dutch farmers could prevent the ground from freezing during their generally mild
winters. When the water was drained, the land beneath it
would produce an early grass crop on which the beasts could
graze. That meant that more animals could be kept alive during the winter.
The relationship between animal husbandry and grain
growing became another feature of commercial agriculture.
In many areas farmers could choose between growing grain
and pasturing animals. When prices for wool or meat were
relatively higher than those for grain, fields could be left in
grass for grazing. When grain prices rose, the same fields
could be plowed. Consolidated enclosed estates made convertible husbandry possible. The decision to hire field-workers or shepherds could be taken only by large agricultural employers. Whatever the relative price of grain, the open-field
village continued to produce grain as its primary crop.
Farmers who could convert their production in tune to the
market not only could maximize their profits but also could
prevent shortages of raw materials for domestic manufacturers or of foodstuffs for urban and rural workers.
Convertible husbandry was but the first step in the development of a true system of regional specialization in agriculture. Different soils and climates favored different use of the
land. In southern and eastern England the soil was thin and
easily depleted by grain growing. Traditionally, the light soil
areas had been used almost exclusively for sheep rearing. On
the other hand, the clay soils of central England, though
poorly drained and hard to work, were more suited to grain
growing. The new agricultural techniques reversed the
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
626
Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
Yield Ratios for Grain
Crops, 1400–1800
10
A
9
8
own. But as landless laborers, either on farms or in rural manufacturing, they could no longer make that claim and many
soon became fodder for the factories, the “dark satanic mills”
that came to disfigure the land once tilled in open-field villages. For the destitute, charity was now visited upon them in
anonymous parish workhouses or in the good works of the
comfortable middle class. In all of those ways the agricultural
revolution changed the face of Europe.
Yield Ratios
7
6
B
5
C
4
D
3
2
1
1400
1500
1600
1700
1800
(Yield ratios = relationship between amount of
seed sown and amount of grain harvested per acre)
A
B
C
D
Great Britain and Low Countries
France, Spain, and Italy
Central Europe and Scandinavia
Eastern Europe
Like the changes in agriculture, the changes in manufacturing
that began in Britain during the eighteenth century were
more revolutionary in consequence than in development. But
their consequences were revolutionary indeed. A work force
that was predominantly agricultural in 1750 had become predominantly industrial a century later. A population that for
centuries had centered on the south and east was now concentrated in the north and west. Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow,
and Birmingham mushroomed into giant cities. While the
population of England grew by 100 percent between 1801 and
1851, from about 8.5 million people to more than 17 million,
the populations of Liverpool and Manchester grew by more
than 1000 percent.
It was the replacement of animal muscle by hydraulic and
mineral energy that made the continued population growth
possible. Water and coal drove machinery that dramatically
increased human productivity. In 1812, one woman could
spin as much thread as 200 women had in 1770. What was
most revolutionary about the Industrial Revolution was the
wave after wave of technological innovation, a constant tinkering and improving of the ways in which things were made,
which could have the simultaneous effects of cutting costs and
improving quality. It was not just the great breakthrough inventions such as the steam engine, the smelting of iron with
coke, and the spinning jenny that were important, but also the
hundreds of adjustments in technique that applied new ideas
in one industry to another, opened bottlenecks, and solved
problems. Ingenuity rather than genius was at the root of the
Industrial Revolution in Britain.
The Industrial Revolution was a sustained period of economic growth and change brought about by the application
of mineral energy and technological innovations to the
process of manufacturing. It took place during the century
between 1750 and 1850, though different industries moved at
different paces and sustained economic growth continued in
Britain until World War I. It is difficult to define the timing of
the Industrial Revolution with any great precision because,
unlike a political event, an economic transformation does not
happen all at once. Nor are new systems and inventions ever
really new. Coal miners had been using rails and wheeled
carriages to move ore since the seventeenth century. In the
sixteenth century, “Jack of Newbury” had housed his cloth
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
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pattern. The introduction of fodder crops and increased fertilization rejuvenated thin soils, and southeastern England became the nation’s breadbasket. Large enclosed estates provided a surplus of grain throughout the eighteenth century.
By the 1760s, England was exporting enough grain to feed
more than a half million people. Similarly, the midland clays
became the location of great sheep runs and cattle herds.
Experiments in herd management, crossbreeding, and fattening all resulted in increased production of wool, milk, meat,
leather, soap, and tallow for candles.
There can be no doubt about the benefits of the transformation of agricultural practices that began in Holland and
England in the seventeenth century and spread slowly to all
corners of the Continent over the next 200 years. Millions
more mouths were fed at lower cost than ever before. In 1700,
each person engaged in farming in England produced enough
food for 1.7 people; in 1800, each produced enough for 2.5
people. Cheaper food allowed more discretionary spending,
which fueled the demand for consumer goods, which in turn
employed more rural manufacturers. But there also were
costs. The transformation of agriculture was also a transformation in a way of life. The open-field village was a community; the enclosed estate was a business. The plight of the rural
poor was tragic enough in villages of kin and neighbors,
where face-to-face charity might be returned from one generation to the next. With their scrap of land and their common
rights, even the poorest villagers laid claim to a place of their
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
IN BRITAIN
The Industrial Revolution in Britain
workers in a large shed. The one was the precursor of the
railroad and the other the precursor of the factory, but each
preceded the Industrial Revolution by more than a century.
Before 1750, innovations made their way slowly into general
use, and after 1850 the pace of growth slowed appreciably.
By then, Britain had a manufacturing economy: fewer than
one-quarter of its labor force engaged in agriculture and
nearly 60 percent were involved in industry, trade, and
transport.
Britain First
The Industrial Revolution occurred first in Britain, but even
in Britain industrialization was a regional rather than a national phenomenon. There were many areas of Britain that remained untouched by innovations in manufacturing methods
and agricultural techniques, although no one remained unaffected by the prosperity that industrialization brought. That
was the result of both national conditions and historical developments. When industrialization spread to the Continent,
it took hold—as it had in Britain—in regions where mineral
resources were abundant or where domestic manufacturing
was a traditional activity. There was no single model for
European industrialization, however often contemporaries
looked toward Britain for the key to unlock the power of economic growth. There was as much technological innovation
in France, as much capital for investment in Holland. Belgium
was rich in coal, while eastern Europe enjoyed an agricultural
surplus that sustained an increase in population. The finest
cotton in the world was made in India; the best iron was made
in Sweden. Each of those factors was in some way a precondition for industrialization, but none by itself proved sufficient.
Only in Britain did those circumstances meld together.
Water and Coal. Among Britain’s blessings, water was
foremost. Water was its best defense, protecting the island
from foreign invasion and making it unnecessary to invest in
a costly standing army. Rather, Britain invested heavily in its
navy to maintain its commercial preeminence around the
globe. The navy protected British interests in times of war and
transported British wares in times of peace. Britain’s position
in the Asian trade made it the leading importer of cottons, ceramics, and teas. Its colonies, especially in North America, not
only provided sugar and tobacco but also formed a rich market for British manufacturing.
But the commercial advantages that water brought were
not confined to oceanic trade. Britain was favored by an internal water system that tied inland communities together. In the
eighteenth century, no place in Britain was more than 70
miles from the sea or more than 30 miles from a navigable
river. Water transport was far cheaper than hauling goods
overland; a packhorse could carry 250 pounds of goods on its
back but could move 100,000 pounds by walking alongside a
river and pulling a barge. Small wonder that river transport
was one of the principal interests of merchants and traders.
Beginning in the 1760s, private concerns began to invest in
the construction of canals, first to move coal from inland locations to major arteries and then to connect the great rivers
themselves. Over the next 50 years several hundred miles of
canals were built by authority of Navigation Acts, which
Pictured here is the mouth of the
underground tunnel for the WorsleyManchester Canal, as depicted in
Arthur Young’s Six Months’ Tour
Through the North of England
(1770). Here at Worsley the canal
led to a significant coal mine, enabling increased coal production
that would improve England’s new
industrial economy.
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Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
allowed for the sale of shares to raise capital. In 1760, the
Duke of Bridgewater (1736–1803) lived up to his name by
completing the first great canal. It brought coal to Manchester
and ultimately to Liverpool. It cost more than £250,000 and
took 14 years of labor to build, but it repaid the duke and his
investors many times over by bringing an uneconomical coal
field into production. Not the least of the beneficiaries were
the people of Manchester, where the price of coal was halved.
Coal was the second of Britain’s natural blessings on which
it improved. Britain’s reserves of wood were nearly depleted
by the eighteenth century, especially those near centers of
population. Coal had been in use as a fuel for several centuries, and the coal trade between London and the northern
coal pits had been essential to the growth of the capital. Coal
was abundant, much of it almost at surface level along the
northeastern coast, and easily transported on water. The location of large coalfields along waterways was a vital condition
of its early use. As canals and roadways improved, more inland coal was brought into production for domestic use. Yet it
was in industry rather than in the home that coal was put to
its greatest use. There again Britain was favored, for large
seams of coal were also located near large seams of iron. At
first, the coincidence was of little consequence, since iron was
smelted by charcoal made from wood and iron foundries were
located deep in forests. But ultimately ironmakers learned to
use coal for fuel, and then the natural economies of having
mineral, fuel, and transport in the same vicinity were given
full play.
Canals
Navigable rivers
Major coalfields
North Sea
Iron ore deposits
SCOTLAND
Glasgow
IRELAND
Dublin
Irish Sea
Liverpool
York
WALES
Birmingham
Celtic Sea
ENGLAND
London
Great Britain: Canals and
Natural Resources
Examine the locations of canals, navigable rivers, and
coal and iron ore deposits in Great Britain. Which parts
of Great Britain did not develop canals? Why? Where
are the canals concentrated? What is the relationship
between canals and major navigable rivers? What about
the relationship between the canals and the coal and
iron ore deposits? Where would you expect railroads to
be built?
More importantly, short-term investments had to give way to
long-term financing. At the end of the seventeenth century,
the creation of the Bank of England had begun the process of
constructing a reliable banking system. The Bank of England
dealt almost entirely with government securities, but it also
served as a bill broker. It bought the debts of reputable merchants at a discount in exchange for Bank of England notes;
Bank of England notes could then be exchanged between
merchants, which increased the liquidity of the English economy, especially in London. It also became the model for
provincial banking by the middle of the eighteenth century.
Private family banks also grew in importance in London,
handling the accounts of merchants and buying shares in
profitable enterprises, of which the canals were a favorite.
Regional banks, smaller and less capitalized, began to use the
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
Economic Infrastructure. The factors that contributed to
Britain’s early industrialization were not only those of natural
advantage. Over the course of years, Britain had developed an
infrastructure for economic advancement. The transformation
of domestic handicrafts to industrial production depended as
much on the abilities of merchants as on those of manufacturers. The markets for domestic manufacturing had largely been
overseas, where British merchants built up relationships over
generations. Export markets were vital to the success of industrialization as production grew dramatically and most ventures needed a quick turnaround of sales to reinvest the profits
in continued growth. The flexibility of English trading houses
would be seen in their ability to shift from reexporting Eastern
and North American goods to exporting British manufactures.
Equally important, increased production meant increased demand for raw materials: Swedish bar iron for casting, Egyptian
and American cotton for textiles, and Oriental silk for luxuries. The expansion of shipping mirrored the expansion of the
economy, tripling during the eighteenth century to more than
one million tons of cargo capacity.
The expansion of shipping, agriculture, and investment in
machines, plant, and raw material all required capital. Not
only did capital have to exist, but it had to be made productive. Profits in agriculture, especially in the south and east,
somehow had to be shifted to investment in industry in the
north and west. The wealth of merchants, which flowed into
London, had to be redistributed throughout the economy.
MAP DISCOVERY
The Industrial Revolution in Britain
private London banks as correspondents, that is, as extensions of their own banks in the city. That allowed local manufacturers and city merchants to do business with one another. The connections between the regional banks and
London facilitated the flow of capital from one section of the
nation to the other. In 1700, there were just 12 provincial
banks; by 1790, there were nearly 300. Banks remained reluctant to invest for the long term, preferring to discount bills
for a few months, but after they developed a relationship
with a particular firm, they were usually willing to continue
to roll the debt over. Although the banking system was vital
to large enterprises, in fact the capital for most industry was
raised locally, from kin and neighbors, and grew by plowing
back profits into the business. At least at the beginning,
manufacturers were willing to take risks and to work for
small returns to ensure the survival and growth of their
business.
Minerals and Metals
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There could have been no Industrial Revolution without
coal. It was the black gold of the eighteenth century, the fuel
that fed the furnaces and turned the engines of industrial expansion. The coal produced by one miner generated as much
energy as 20 horses. Coal was the first capital-intensive industry in Britain, already well developed by the seventeenth
century. Owners paid the costs of sinking shafts, building
roads, and erecting winding machines. Miners were brought
to a pit and paid piecework for their labor. Only the very
wealthy could afford to invest in coal mining, and it was by
chance that British law vested mineral rights in owners rather
than users of the land, as was the case on the Continent. That
meant that the largest English coalfields were owned by
landed families of means who were able to invest agricultural
profits in mining. Britain’s traditional elites thus played a
crucial role in the industrial transformation of the agrarian
economy from which their wealth and social standing had
derived.
Early Coal Mining. The technical problems of coal mining
grew with demand. As surface seams were exhausted it became necessary to dig deeper shafts, to lower miners farther
underground, and to raise the coal greater heights to the surface. Men loosened the coal from the seam; women and children hauled it to the shaft. They also cleared the tons of debris
that came loose with the coal. Underground mining was extremely dangerous. In addition to all-too-frequent cave-ins,
miners struggled against inadequate ventilation and light.
Better ventilation was achieved by the expensive method of
sinking second and third shafts into the same seam, allowing
for cross breezes. Candles and sparks created by flint wheels
addressed the problem of light, though both methods suffered
from the disadvantage that most pits contained combustible
gases. Even after a fireman walked through the mine exploding gas with a long lighted stick, many miners preferred to
work in total darkness, feeling the edges of the seam.
629
But by far the most difficult mining problem was water. As
pits were sunk deeper they reached pools of groundwater,
which enlarged as the coal was stripped away from the earth.
Dripping water increased the difficulty of hewing, standing
water the difficulty of hauling. The pit acted like a riverbed
and filled quickly. Water drainage presented the greatest obstacle to deep-shaft mining. Women and children could carry
the water out in large skin-lined baskets, which were attached
to a winding wheel and pulled up by horses. Primitive pumps,
also horse-powered, had been devised for the same purpose.
Neither method was efficient or effective when shafts sank
deeper. In 1709, Thomas Newcomen (1663–1729) introduced
a steam-driven pump that enabled water to be sucked
through a pipe directly from the pit bottom to the surface.
Although the engine was expensive to build and needed tons
of coal to create the steam, it could raise the same amount of
water in a day as 2500 humans. Such economies of labor were
enormous, and within 20 years of its introduction there were
78 engines draining coal and metal mines in England.
Innovations such as Newcomen’s engine helped increase
output of coal at just the time that it became needed as an industrial fuel. Between 1700 and 1830, coal production increased tenfold despite the fact that deeper and more difficult
seams were being worked. Eventually, the largest demand for
coal came from the iron industry. In 1793, just two ironworks
consumed as much coal as the entire population of
Edinburgh. Like mining coal, making iron was both capitaland labor-intensive, requiring expensive furnaces, water-powered bellows, and mills in which forged iron could be slit into
rods or rolled into sheets. Ironmaking depended upon an
abundance of wood, for it took the charcoal derived from 10
acres of trees to refine 1 ton of iron ore. After the ore was
mined, it was smelted into pig iron, a low-grade, brittle metal.
Pig iron was converted to higher-quality bar iron in charcoalpowered forges that burned off some of its impurities. From
bar iron came the rods and sheets used in casting household
items such as pots and nails or in making finer wrought iron
products such as plows and armaments. Because each process
in the making of iron was separate, furnaces, forges, and mills
were located near their own supplies of wood. The shipping of
the bulky ore, pig iron, and bar iron added substantially to its
cost, and it was cheaper to import bars from Sweden than to
carry them 20 miles overland.
The great innovations in the production of iron came with
the development of techniques that allowed for the use of coal
rather than wood charcoal in smelting and forging. As early as
1709, Abraham Darby (ca. 1678–1717), a Quaker nail maker,
experimented with smelting iron ore with coke, coal from
which most of the gas has been burned off. Iron coking
greatly reduced the cost of fuel in the first stages of production, but because most ironworks were located in woodlands
rather than near coal pits, the method was not widely
adopted. Moreover, although coke made from coal was
cheaper than charcoal made from wood, coke added its own
impurities to the iron ore. Nor could it provide the intense
heat needed for smelting without a large bellows. The cost of
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
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Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
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Britain’s ample coal deposits were
one of the country’s assets as it industrialized. This painting of the pithead of an eighteenth-century coal
mine shows the coexistence of the
new steam technology with aspects
of older forms of production, such
as the use of beasts of burden.
the bellows offset the savings from the coke until James Watt
(1736–1819) invented a new form of steam engine in 1775.
■
James Watt’s rotary beam steam engine. This model was built in
1788 to provide rotary power to the lapping and polishing machines at Matthew Boulton’s Soho Engineering Works in
Birmingham, England, where Watt and Boulton manufactured
steam engines from 1775 to 1810.
motion, which could be used for machines and ultimately
for locomotion.
Watt’s engine received its first practical application in the
iron industry. Wilkinson became one of the largest customers
for steam engines, using them for pumping, moving wheels,
and ultimately increasing the power of the blast of air in the
forge. Increasing the heat provided by coke in the smelting
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
The Steam Engine. Like most innovations of the
Industrial Revolution, James Watt’s steam engine was an
adaptation of existing technology made possible by the sophistication of techniques in a variety of fields. Although Watt
is credited with the invention of the condensing steam engine,
one of the seminal creations in human history, the success of
his work depended upon the achievements of numerous others. Watt’s introduction to the steam engine was accidental.
An instrument maker in Glasgow, he was asked to repair a
model of a Newcomen engine and immediately realized that it
would work more efficiently if there were a separate chamber
for the condensation of the steam. Although his idea was
sound, Watt spent years attempting to implement it. He was
continually frustrated that poor-quality valves and cylinders
never fit well enough together to prevent steam from escaping
from the engine.
Watt was unable to translate his idea into a practical
invention until he became partners with the Birmingham
ironmaker and manufacturer Matthew Boulton (1728–1809).
At Boulton’s works, Watt found craftsmen who could make
precision engine valves, and at the foundries of John
Wilkinson (1728–1808) he found workers who could bore the
cylinders of his engine to exact specifications. Watt’s partnership with Boulton and Wilkinson was vital to the success
of the steam engine. But Watt himself possessed the qualities
necessary to ensure that his ideas were transformed into
reality. He persevered through years of unsuccessful experimentation and searched out partners to provide capital and
expertise. He saw beyond bare mechanics, realizing the practical utility of his invention long before it was perfected.
Watt designed the mechanism to convert the traditional upand-down motion of the pumping engine into rotary
The Industrial Revolution in Britain
and forging of iron led to the transformation of the industry.
In the 1780s, Henry Cort (1740–1800), a naval contractor, experimented with a technique for using coke as fuel in removing the impurities from pig iron. The iron was melted into
puddles and stirred with rods. The gaseous carbon that was
brought to the surface burned off, leaving a purer and more
malleable iron than even charcoal could produce. Because the
iron had been purified in a molten state, Cort reasoned that it
could be rolled directly into sheets rather than first made into
bars. He erected a rolling mill adjacent to his forge and combined two separate processes into one.
Puddling and rolling had an immediate impact upon iron
production. There was no longer any need to use charcoal in
the stages of forging and rolling. From mineral to workable
sheets, iron could be made entirely with coke. Ironworks
moved to the coalfields, where the economies of transporting
fuel and finished product were great. Moreover, the distinct
stages of production were eliminated. Rather than separate
smelting, forging, and finishing industries, one consolidated
manufacturing process had been created. Forges, furnaces, and
rolling machines were brought together and powered by steam
engines. Cort’s rolling technique alone increased output 15
times. By 1808, output of pig iron had grown from 68,000 to
250,000 tons and of bar iron from 32,000 to 100,000 tons.
Cotton Is King
Traditionally, British commerce had been dominated by the
woolen cloth trade, in which techniques of production had
not changed for hundreds of years. Running water was used
for cleaning and separating fleece; crude wooden wheels spun
the thread; simple handlooms wove together the long warp
threads and the short weft ones. It took nearly four female
spinners to provide the materials for one male weaver, the
tasks having long been gender-specific. During the course of
the seventeenth century, new fabrics appeared on the domestic market, particularly linen, silk, and cotton. It was cotton
that captured the imagination of the eighteenth-century consumer, especially brightly colored, finely spun Indian cotton.
Domestic Industries. Spinning and weaving were organized as domestic industries. Work was done in the home on
small, inexpensive machines to supplement the income from
farming. Putters-out were especially frustrated by the difficulty in obtaining yarn for weaving in the autumn, when female laborers were needed for the harvest. Even the widespread development of full-time domestic manufacturers did
not satisfy the increased demand for cloth. Limited output
and variable quality characterized British textile production
throughout the early part of the eighteenth century. The
breakthrough came with technological innovation. Beginning
in the mid-eighteenth century, a series of new machines dramatically increased output and, for the first time, allowed
English textiles to compete with Indian imports.
The first innovation was the flying shuttle, invented by
John Kay (1704–1764) in the 1730s. A series of hammers
drove the shuttle, which held the weft, through the stretched
warp on the loom. The flying shuttle allowed weavers to work
alone rather than in pairs, but it was adopted slowly because it
increased the demand for spun thread, which was already in
In the eighteenth century, a number of British inventors patented new machines that transformed
the British textile industry and marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Among the
inventions was the spinning jenny, invented by James Hargreaves in 1764, and named for his
daughter. The jenny, which permitted the spinning of a number of threads at the same time, made
possible the automatic production of cotton thread.
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Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
Cotton
Linen
Silk
North Sea
Wool
SCOTLAND
IRELAND
Irish Sea
WALES
ENGLAND
Celtic Sea
■
Great Britain: Textile Centers. Textiles had been the traditional industrial activity in Britain and almost every region of the country
had organized textile production.
Cotton Factories. Richard Arkwright constructed the first
cotton factories in Britain, all of which were designed to house
water frames. The first was established in 1769 at Cromford
near Nottingham, which was the center of stocking manufacture. The site was chosen for its isolation, since stockings were
an article of fashion in which secrecy was most important. The
Cromford mill was a four-story building that ultimately employed more than 800 workers. During the next quarter century, Arkwright built more than a dozen other mills, most in
partnership with wealthy manufacturers. Arkwright’s genius
lay in industrial management rather than mechanical innovation. As others switched from frames to mules, Arkwright
stubbornly stuck to his own invention. When steam power began to replace water, he failed to make the shift. But his methods of constructing and financing factories were undeniably
successful. From a modest beginning as a traveling salesman of
wigs, Sir Richard Arkwright died in possession of a fortune
worth more than £500,000.
The organization of the cotton industry into factories was
one of the pivotal transformations in economic life. Domestic
spinning and weaving took place in agricultural villages; factory production took place in mill towns. The
location of the factory determined movements of population, and from the first quarter of the eighteenth
century onward a great shift toward northeast England Industrial Society
and Factory
was under way. Moreover, the character of the work itConditions
self changed. The operation of heavy machinery reversed the traditional gender-based tasks. Mule spinning became men’s work, while handloom weaving was taken over by
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
short supply. The spinning bottleneck was opened by James
Hargreaves (d. 1778), who devised a machine known as the
jenny. The jenny was a wooden frame containing a number of
spindles around which thread was drawn by means of a handturned wheel. The first jennies allowed for the spinning of
eight threads at once, and improvements brought the number
to more than 100. Jennies replaced spinning wheels by the
tens of thousands. The jenny was a crucial breakthrough in redressing the balance between spinning and weaving, though it
did not solve all problems. Jenny-spun thread was not strong
enough to be used as warp, which continued to be wheel spun.
But the jenny could spin cotton in unimaginable quantities.
As is often the case with technological change, one innovation followed another. The problem set by improvements in
weaving gave rise to solutions for increasing the output of spinners. The need to provide stronger warp threads posed by the
introduction of the jenny was ultimately solved by the development of the water frame. It was created in 1769 by Richard
Arkwright (1732–1792), whose name was also to be associated
with the founding of the modern factory system. Arkwright’s
frame consisted of a series of water-driven rollers that stretched
the cotton before spinning. The stronger fibers could be spun
into threads suitable for warp, and English manufacturers could
finally produce an all-cotton fabric. It was not long before another innovator realized that the water frame and the jenny
could be combined into a single machine, one that would pro-
duce an even finer cotton yarn than that made in India. The
mule, so named because it was a cross between a frame and a
jenny, was invented by Samuel Crompton (1753–1827), who
sold its rights for only £60. It was the decisive innovation in cotton production. By 1811, ten times as many threads were being
spun on mules as on water frames and jennies combined.
The original mules were small machines that, like the jennies,
could be used for domestic manufactures. But increasingly the
mule followed the water frame into purposely built factories,
where it became larger and more expensive. The need for large
rooms to house the equipment and for a ready source of running water to power it provided an incentive for the creation of
factories, but secrecy provided a greater one. The original factories were called “safe-boxes,” and whether they were established
for the manufacture of silk or cotton, their purpose was to protect trade secrets. Innovators took out patents to prevent their
inventions from being copied and fought long lawsuits to prevent their machines from being used. Workers were sworn to secrecy about the techniques they were taught. Imitators practiced
industrial espionage as sophisticated as the age would allow: enticing knowledgeable workers; employing spies; copying inventions. Although the factory was designed to protect secrets, its
other benefits were quickly realized. Manufacturers could maintain control over the quality of products through strict supervision of the work force. Moreover, workers in shifts could keep
the costly machines in continuous use.
The Industrial Revolution in Britain
633
THE WEALTH OF BRITAIN
Cotton was the first of the new industries that led to British economic domination in the nineteenth century. In cotton
production, new inventions such as the spinning jenny and the water frame revolutionized manufacture, and the factory
system was born. Britain’s domination of cotton production impressed contemporaries. In this excerpt, a contemporary
tries to explain why Britain took the lead in industrialization.
Focus Questions
How important does the author think geography and natural resources have been to Britain’s industrial success?
What is the relation between industrialization and forms of
government?
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
In comparing the advantages of England for manufactures
with those of other countries, we can by no means overlook
the excellent commercial position of the country—intermediate between the north and south of Europe; and its insular
situation, which, combined with the command of the seas,
secures our territory from invasion or annoyance. The
German ocean, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean are the regular highways for our ships; and our western ports command
an unobstructed passage to the Atlantic, and to every quarter
of the world.
A temperate climate, and a hardy race of men, have also
greatly contributed to promote the manufacturing industry of England.
The political and moral advantages of this country, as a
seat of manufactures, are not less remarkable than its phys-
women. The mechanization of weaving took longer than that
of spinning, both because of difficulties in perfecting a power
loom and because of opposition to its introduction by workers known as Luddites, who organized machine-breaking riots in the 1810s. The Luddites attempted to maintain the traditional organization of their industry and the independence
of their labor. For a time, handloom weavers managed to survive by accepting lower and lower piece rates. But their competition was like that of a horse against an automobile. In
1820, there were more than 250,000 handloom weavers in
Britain; by 1850, the number was less than 50,000. Weaving as
well as spinning became factory work.
The transformation of cotton manufacture had a profound
effect on the overall growth of the British economy. It increased shipping because the raw material had to be imported,
first from the Mediterranean and then from America.
American cotton—especially after 1794, when American inventor Eli Whitney (1765–1825) patented his cotton gin—fed
a nearly insatiable demand. This appetite was met primarily
because American cotton plantations used slave labor to plant
and harvest their crop. In 1750, Britain imported less than 5
million pounds of raw cotton; a century later the volume had
ical advantages. The arts are the daughters of peace and
liberty. In no country have these blessings been enjoyed in
so high a degree, or for so long a continuance, as in
England. Under the reign of just laws, personal liberty and
property have been secure; mercantile enterprise has been
allowed to reap its reward; capital has accumulated in
safety; the workman has “gone forth to his work and to his
labour until the evening”; and, thus protected and
favoured, the manufacturing prosperity of the country has
struck its roots deep, and spread forth its branches to the
ends of the earth.
England has also gained by the calamities of other
countries, and the intolerance of other governments. At
different periods, the Flemish and French protestants; expelled from their native lands, have taken refuge in
England, and have repaid the protection given them by
practising and teaching branches of industry, in which the
English were then less expert than their neighbours.
From Edward Baines, The History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great
Britain (1835).
grown to 588 million pounds. And to each pound of raw cotton, British manufacturers added the value of their technology
and their labor. By the mid-nineteenth century, nearly a half
million people earned their living from cotton, which alone accounted for more than 40 percent of the value of all British exports. Cotton was undeniably the king of manufactured goods.
The Iron Horse
The first stage of the Industrial Revolution in Britain was driven
by the production of consumer goods. Pottery, cast-iron tools,
clocks, toys, and textiles, especially cottons—all were manufactured in quantities unknown in the early eighteenth century.
The products fed a ravenous market at home and abroad. The
greatest complaint of industrialists was that they could not get
enough raw materials or fuel, nor could they ship their finished
products fast enough to keep up with demand. Transportation
was becoming a serious stumbling block to continued economic
growth. Even with the completion of the canal network that
linked the major rivers and improvement in highways and tollways, raw materials and finished goods moved slowly and uncertainly. It was said that it took as long to ship goods from
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Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
Manchester to Liverpool on the Duke of Bridgewater’s canal as it
did to sail from New York to Liverpool on the Atlantic Ocean.
Furthermore, once the canals had a monopoly on bulk cargo,
transportation costs began to rise.
It was the need to ship increasing amounts of coal to
foundries and factories that provided the spur for the development of a new form of transportation. Ever since the seventeenth century, coal had been moved from the seam to the pit
on rails, first constructed of wood and later of iron. Broadwheeled carts hitched to horses were as much dragged as
rolled, but that still represented the most efficient form of
hauling, and those railways ultimately ran from the seam to
the dock. By 1800, there was perhaps as much as 300 miles of
iron rail in British mines.
In the same year, Watt’s patent on the steam engine expired,
and inventors began to apply the engine to a variety of mechanical tasks. Richard Trevithick (1771–1833), whose father
managed a tin mine in Cornwall, was the first to experiment
with a steam-driven carriage. George Stephenson (1781–1848),
who is generally recognized as the father of the modern railroad, made two crucial improvements. In mine railways the
wheels of the cart were smooth and the rail was grooved.
Stephenson reversed the construction to provide better traction and less wear. Perhaps more importantly, Stephenson
made the vital improvement in engine power by increasing the
steam pressure in the boiler and exhausting the smoke through
a chimney. In 1829, he won a £500 prize with his engine “The
■
Great Britain: Railroads (ca. 1850). All rails led to London as the
major lines were built to transport passengers as well as goods.
Railroads
North Sea
SCOTLAND
Glasgow
IRELAND
Irish Sea
Dublin
ENGLAND
Liverpool
Manchester
Birmingham
WALES
London
The First Railways. In 1830 the first modern railway, the
Manchester-to-Liverpool line, was opened. Like the Duke of
Bridgewater’s canal, it was designed to move coal and bulk
goods, but surprisingly its most important function came to
be moving people. In its first year, the Manchester–Liverpool
line carried more than 400,000 passengers, which generated
double the revenue derived from freight. The railway was
quicker, more comfortable, and ultimately cheaper than the
coach. Investors in the Manchester–Liverpool line, who pocketed a comfortable 9.5 percent when government securities
were paying 3.5 percent, learned quickly that links between
population centers were as important as those between industrial sites. The London–Birmingham and London–Bristol
lines were both designed with passenger traffic in mind.
Railway building was one of the great boom activities of
British industrialization. Since it came toward the end of the
mechanization of factories, investors and industrialists were
psychologically prepared for the benefits of technological innovation. By 1835, Parliament had passed 54 separate acts to
establish more than 750 miles of railways. Ten years later,
more than 6000 miles had been sanctioned and more than
2500 miles built; by 1852, more than 7500 miles of track were
in use. The railways were built on the model of the canals.
Private bills passed through Parliament, which allowed a company to raise money through the sale of stock. Most railways
were trunk lines, connecting one town to another or joining
two longer lines together. They were run by small companies,
and few ultimately proved profitable. Only because of the
dominant influence of George Stephenson and his son Robert
(1803–1859) was there an attempt to establish a standard
gauge for tracks and engines. Britain was the only country in
which the government did not take a leading role in building
the railways. Hundreds of millions of pounds were raised privately, and in the end it is calculated that the railroads cost
£40,000 a mile to build, more than three times the cost per
mile of railroads on the Continent and in the United States.
From Goods to Passengers. Nevertheless, the investment
paid huge dividends. By the 1850s, the original purpose of the
railways was being realized as freight revenues finally surpassed passenger revenues. Coal was the dominant cargo
shipped by rail, and the speedy, efficient service continued to
drive down prices. The iron and steel industries were modernized on the back of demand for rails, engines, and castiron seats and fittings. In peak periods—and railway building
was a boom-and-bust affair—as much as a quarter of the output of the rolling mills went into domestic railroads, and
much more into Continental systems. The railways were also a
massive consumer of bricks for beddings, sidings, and especially bridges, tunnels, and stations. Finally, the railways were
a leading employer of labor, surpassing the textile mills in
peak periods. Hundreds of thousands worked in tasks as varied as engineering and ditch digging, for even in that most ad-
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
Celtic Sea
Rocket,” which pulled a load three times its own weight at a
speed of 30 miles per hour and could actually outrun a horse.
The Industrial Revolution in Britain
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
■
635
Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), The Third-Class Carriage. Daumier captured a human condition peculiar to the modern era: “the lonely crowd.”
vanced industry, sophisticated mechanized production went
hand in hand with traditional drudgery. More than 60,000
workers were permanently engaged in the industry to run
trains, mind stations, and repair track. Countless others were
employed in manufacturing engines, carriages, boxcars, and
the thousands of components that went into making them.
Most of all, the railroads changed the nature of people’s
lives. Whole new concepts of time, space, and speed emerged
to govern daily activities. As Henry Booth, an early railroad
official, observed, “Notions which we have received from our
ancestors and verified by our own experience are overthrown
in a day. What was slow is now quick; what was distant is now
near.” Coach travel had ordinarily been limited to those with
means, not only because it was expensive, but also because it
was time-consuming. Ordinary people could not take off the
days necessary to complete relatively short round-trip journeys. When passenger rail service began, there was even a debate over whether provision should be made for third-class
passengers, a class unknown on the coaches, where the only
choices were riding inside for comfort or outside for savings.
Third-class passengers quickly became the staple of railroad
service. The cheap excursion was born to provide short holidays or even day trips. The career of Thomas Cook
(1808–1892), who became the world’s first travel agent, began
after he took a short excursion. More than six million people
visited London by train to view the Crystal Palace exhibition
in 1851, a number equivalent to one-third of the population
of England and Wales. The railways did more than link places;
they brought people together and helped develop a sense of
national identity by speeding up all forms of communication.
Entrepreneurs and Managers
The Industrial Revolution in Britain was not simply invented.
Too much credit is given to a few breakthroughs and too little
to the ways in which they were improved and dispersed. The
Industrial Revolution was an age of gadgets when people
believed that new was better than old and that there was always room for improvement. “The age is running mad after
innovation,” the English moralist Dr. Johnson wrote. “All the
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
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Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
specialization of function. The processes of production were divided and subdivided until workers performed a basic task over
and over. The education of the work force was the industrial
manager’s greatest challenge. Workers had to be taught how to
use and maintain their machines and disciplined to apply themselves continuously. At least at the beginning, it was difficult to
staff the factories. Many employed children as young as seven
from workhouses or orphanages, who, though cheap to pay,
were difficult to train and discipline. It was the task of the manager to break old habits of intermittent work, indifference to
quality, and petty theft of materials. Families were preferred to
individuals, for then parents could instruct and supervise their
children. There is no reason to believe that industrial managers
were more brutal masters than farmers or that children were
treated better in workhouses than in mills. Labor was a business
asset, what was sometimes called “living machinery,” and its
control with carrots and sticks was the chief concern of the industrial manager.
Who were the industrialists who transformed the traditional
economy? Because British society was relatively open, they came
from every conceivable background: dukes and orphans, merchants and salesmen, inventors and improvers. Although some
went from rags to riches—such as Richard Arkwright, who was
the thirteenth child of a poor barber—it was extremely difficult
for a laborer to acquire the capital necessary to set up a business.
Wealthy landowners were prominent in capital-intensive aspects
of industries—for example, owning ironworks
and mines—but few established factories.
Most industrialists came from the middle
classes, which, while comprising one-third of
the British population, provided as much
as two-thirds of the first generation of
industrialists. That first generation
included lawyers, bankers, merchants, and those already engaged
in manufacturing, as well as
tradesmen, shopkeepers, and selfemployed artisans. The career of
every industrialist was different, as
a look at two—Josiah Wedgwood
and Robert Owen—will show.
Josiah Wedgwood. Josiah
Wedgwood (1730–1795) was the
thirteenth child of a long-established English potting family. He
worked in the potteries from
childhood, but a deformed leg
■
Jasperware copy of the Portland
vase by Josiah Wedgwood. The Portland
vase is one of the most famous ancient
vases. It was found near Rome in the seventeenth century in a tomb believed to be that
of Alexander Severus.
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
business of the world is done in a new way; men are hanged in
a new way.” Societies for the advancement of knowledge
sprang up all over Britain. Journals and magazines promoted
new ideas and techniques. Competitions were held for the
best invention of the year; prizes were awarded for agricultural achievements. Practical rather than pure science was the
hallmark of industrial development.
Yet technological innovation was not the same as industrialization. A vital change in economic activity took place in the
organization of industry. Putters-out with their circulating
capital and hired laborers could never make the economies
necessary to increase output and quality while simultaneously
lowering costs. That was the achievement of industrialists,
producers who owned workplace, machinery, and raw materials and invested fixed capital by plowing back their profits.
Industrial enterprises came in all sizes and shapes. A cotton
mill could be started with as little as £300 or as much as
£10,000. As late as 1840, fewer than 10 percent of the mills
employed more than 500 workers. Most were family concerns
with less than 100 employees, and many of them failed. For
every story with a happy ending, there was another with a sad
one. When Major Edmund Cartwright (1740–1824) erected a
cotton mill, he was offered a Watt steam engine built for a distiller who had gone bankrupt. He acquired his machinery at
the auction of another bankrupt mill. Cartwright’s mill, engine, and machinery ended on the auction block less than
three years later. There were more than 30,000
bankruptcies in the eighteenth century, testimony both to the risks of business and to the
willingness of entrepreneurs to take them.
To survive against the odds, successful
industrialists had to be both entrepreneur and manager. As entrepreneurs, they raised capital, almost
always locally from relatives,
friends, or members of their
church. Quakers were especially
active in financing each other’s
enterprises. The industrial entrepreneur also had to understand
the latest methods for building
and powering machinery and
the most up-to-date techniques
for performing the work. One
early manufacturer claimed “a
practical knowledge of every
process from the cotton-bag to
the piece of cloth.” Finally, entrepreneurs had to know how to
market their goods. In those functions, industrial entrepreneurs developed logically from putters-out.
But industrialists also had to be
managers. The most difficult task was organization of the workplace. Most gains
in productivity were achieved through the
The Industrial Revolution in Britain
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
made it difficult for him to turn the wheel. Instead he studied
the structure of the business. His head teemed with ideas for
improving ceramic manufacturing, but it was not until he was
30 that he could set up on his own and introduce his innovations, which encompassed both technique and organization,
the entrepreneurial and managerial sides of his business.
Wedgwood developed new mixtures of clays that took brilliant colors in the kiln and new glazes for both useful and ornamental ware. His technical innovations were all the more
remarkable in that he had little education in mineral chemistry and made his discoveries by simple trial and error. But
there was nothing of either luck or good fortune in
Wedgwood’s managerial innovations. He was repelled by the
disorder of the traditional pottery, with its waste of materials,
uneven quality, and slow output. When he began his first
works, he divided the making of pottery into distinct tasks
and assigned separate workers to them. One group did nothing but throw the pots on the wheel; another painted designs;
a third glazed. To achieve the division of function, Wedgwood
had to train his own workers almost from childhood.
Traditional potters performed every task from molding to
glazing and prized the fact that no two pieces were ever alike.
Wedgwood wanted each piece to replicate another, and he
stalked the works breaking defective wares on his wooden leg.
He invested in schools to help train young artists, in canals to
transport his products, and in London shops to sell them.
Wedgwood was a marketing genius. He named his famed
cream-colored pottery Queen’s Ware and made special coffee
and tea services for leading aristocratic families. He would
then sell replicas by the thousands. In less than 20 years,
Wedgwood pottery was prized all over Europe and
Wedgwood’s potting works were the standard of the industry.
Robert Owen. Robert Owen (1771–1858) did not have a
family business to develop. The son of a small tradesman, he
was apprenticed to a clothier at the age of 10. As a teenager he
worked as a shop assistant in Manchester, where he audaciously applied for a job as a manager of a cotton mill. At 19,
he was supervising 500 workers and learning the cotton trade.
Owen was immediately successful, increasing the output of
his workers and introducing new materials to the mill. In
1816, he entered a partnership to purchase the New Lanark
mill in Scotland. Owen found conditions in Scotland much
worse than those in Manchester. More than 500 workhouse
children were employed at New Lanark, where drunkenness
and theft were endemic. Owen believed that to improve the
quality of work one had to improve the quality of the workplace. He replaced old machinery with new, reduced working
hours, and instituted a monitoring system to check theft. To
enhance life outside the factory, he established a high-quality
company-run store, which plowed its profits into a school for
village children.
Owen was struck by the irony that in the mills, machines
were better cared for than were humans. He thought that with
the same attention to detail that had so improved the quality of
commodities he could make even greater improvements in the
637
Major manufacturing
districts
SCOTLAND
Aberdeen
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
North Sea
Glasgow
Newcastle
IRELAND
Irish Sea
Manchester
Liverpool
Birmingham
WALES
Leeds
Sheffield
Nottingham
Leicester
ENGLAND
Bristol
Southampton
■
London
Great Britain: Manufacturing Centers. The growth of manufacturers in the Midlands led to a massive population shift and the development of major urban areas such as Manchester.
quality of life. He prohibited children under 10 from mill work
and instituted a 10-hour day for child labor. His local school
took infants from one year old, freeing women to work and
ensuring each child an education. Owen instituted old-age and
disability pensions, funded by mandatory contributions from
workers’ wages. Taverns were closed and workers were fined
for drunkenness and sexual offenses. In the factory and the village, Owen established a principle of communal regulation to
improve both the work and the character of his employees.
New Lanark became the model of the world of the future, and
each year thousands made an industrial pilgrimage to visit it.
The Wages of Progress
Robert Owen ended his life as a social reformer. His efforts to
improve the lot of his workers at New Lanark led to experiments to create ideal industrial communities throughout the
world. He founded cooperative societies, in which all members shared in the profits of the business, and supported trade
unions in which workers could better their lives. His followers
planted colonies where goods were held in common and the
fruits of labor belonged to the laborers. Owen’s agitation for
social reform was part of a movement that produced results of
lasting consequence. The Factory Act (1833) prohibited factory work by children under nine, provided two hours of daily
education, and effectively created a 12-hour day in the mills
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
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Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
THE SIN OF WAGES
Robert Owen was both a successful manufacturer and a leading philanthropist. He believed that economic advance had
to take place in step with the improvement of the moral and physical well-being of the workers. He organized schools,
company shops, and ultimately utopian communities in an effort to improve the lives of industrial laborers. Owen was
one of the first social commentators to argue that industrialism threatened the fabric of family and community life.
Focus Questions
What effect does the luxury market have on “the lower orders”? Why are commercial competition and its effects becoming more intense?
The acquisition of wealth, and the desire which it naturally
creates for a continued increase, have introduced a fondness for essentially injurious luxuries among a numerous
class of individuals who formerly never thought of them,
and they have also generated a disposition which strongly
impels its possessors to sacrifice the best feelings of human
nature to this love of accumulation. To succeed in this career, the industry of the lower orders, from whose labour
this wealth is now drawn, has been carried by new competitors striving against those of longer standing, to a point
of real oppression, reducing them by successive changes, as
the spirit of competition increased and the ease of acquiring wealth diminished, to a state more wretched than can
be imagined by those who have not attentively observed
From Robert Owen, Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing
System (1815).
England doubled from 9 to 18 million, with growth most rapid
in the newly urban north and west. In 1750, about 15 percent
of the population lived in urban areas; by 1850, about 60 percent did. Industrial workers married younger and produced
more children than their agricultural counterparts. For centuries, women had married in their middle twenties, but by
1800, age at first marriage had dropped to 23 for the female
population as a whole and to nearly 20 in the industrial areas.
That was in part because factory hands did not have to wait
until they inherited land or money, and in part because they
did not have to serve an apprenticeship. But early marriage
and large families were also a bet on the future, a belief that
things were better now and would be even better soon, that the
new mouths would be fed and the new bodies clothed. It was
an investment on the part of ordinary people similar to that
made by bankers and entrepreneurs when they risked their
capital in new businesses. Was it an investment that paid off?
Expansion of Wealth. It is difficult to calculate the benefits
of the Industrial Revolution or to weigh them against the costs.
What is certain is that there was a vast expansion of wealth as
well as a vast expansion of people to share it. Agricultural and
industrial change made it possible to support comfortably a
population more than three times larger than that of the sev-
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
until the Ten Hours Act (1847). The Mines Act (1842) prohibited women and children from working underground.
Nor was Owen alone in dedicating time and money to the
improvement of workers’ lives. The rapid growth of unplanned cities exacerbated the plight of those too poor and
overworked to help themselves. Conditions of housing and
sanitation were appalling even by nineteenth-century
standards. The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the
Laboring Population of Britain (1842), written by
Edwin Chadwick (1800–1890), so shocked Parliament
Chadwick, The
and the nation that it helped to shift the burden of soSanitary
Condition of the cial reform to government. The Public Health Act
Laboring
(1848) established boards of health and the office of
Population of
medical examiner, while the Vaccination Act (1853)
Britain
and the Contagious Diseases Act (1864) attempted to
control epidemics. (See “A Closer Look: Industry and the
Environment,” pp. 640–641.)
The movement for social reform began almost as soon as
industrialization. The Industrial Revolution initiated profound changes in the organization of British society. Cities
sprang up from grain fields almost overnight. The lure of
steady work and high wages prompted an exodus from rural
Britain and spurred an unremitting boom in population. In
the first half of the nineteenth century, the population of
the changes as they have gradually occurred. In consequence, they are at present in a situation infinitely more
degraded and miserable than they were before the introduction of these manufactories, upon the success of which
their bare subsistence now depends. . . .
The inhabitants of every country are trained and
formed by its great leading existing circumstances, and the
character of the lower orders in Britain is now formed
chiefly by circumstances arising from trade, manufactures,
and commerce; and the governing principle of trade, manufactures, and commerce is immediate pecuniary gain, to
which on the great scale every other is made to give way.
All are sedulously trained to buy cheap and to sell dear;
and to succeed in this art, the parties must be taught to acquire strong powers of deception; and thus a spirit is generated through every class of traders, destructive of that
open, honest sincerity, without which man cannot make
others happy, nor enjoy happiness himself.
The Industrial Revolution in Britain
enteenth century, when it was widely believed that England
had reached the limits of expansion. Despite the fact that population doubled between 1801 and 1851, per capita income
rose by 75 percent. Had the population remained stable, per
capita income would have increased by a staggering 350 percent. At the same time, untold millions of pounds had been
sunk into canals, roads, railways, factories, mines, and mills.
But the expansion of wealth is not the same as the improvement in the quality of life, for wealth is not equally distributed.
An increase in the level of wealth may mean only that the rich
are getting richer more quickly than the poor are getting
poorer. Similarly, economic growth over a century involved the
lives of several generations, each of which experienced different standards of living. One set of parents may have sacrificed
for the future of their children; another may have mortgaged
it. Moreover, economic activity is cyclical. Trade depressions,
such as those induced by the War of 1812 and the American
Civil War, which interrupted cotton supplies, could have disastrous short-term effects. The “Great Hunger” of the 1840s was
a time of agrarian crisis and industrial slump. The downturn
of 1842 threw 60 percent of the factory workers in the town of
Bolton out of work at a time when there was neither unemployment insurance nor a welfare system. Finally, quality of life
639
cannot be measured simply in economic terms. People with
more money to spend may still be worse off than their ancestors, who may have preferred leisure to wealth or independence to the discipline of the clock.
Thus there are no easy answers to the quality-of-life question. In the first stages of industrialization, it seems clear that
only the wealthy benefited economically, though much of
their increased wealth was reinvested in expansion. Under the
impact of population growth, the Napoleonic wars, and regional harvest failure, real wages seem to have fallen from the
levels reached in the 1730s. Industrial workers were not substantially better off than agricultural laborers when the high
cost of food and rent is considered. But beginning around
1820, there is convincing evidence that the real wages of industrial workers were rising despite the fact that more and
more work was semi- and unskilled machine-minding and
more of it was being done by women, who were generally paid
only two-thirds the wages of men. Although the increase in
real wages was still subject to trade cycles, such as the Great
Hunger of the 1840s, it continued nearly unabated for the rest
of the nineteenth century. Thus, in the second half of the
Industrial Revolution, both employers and workers saw a bettering of their economic situation, which was one reason why
EXPLOITING THE YOUNG
The condition of child laborers was a concern of English legislators and social reformers from the beginning of industrialization. Most of the attention was given to factory workers, and most legislation attempted to regulate the age at which
children could begin work, the number of hours they could be made to work, and the provision of schooling and religious
education during their leisure. It was not until the early 1840s that a parliamentary commission was formed to investigate the condition of child labor in the mines. In this extract, the testimony of the child is confirmed by the observations
of one of the commissioners.
Focus Questions
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
How does Mr. Franks’s account differ from Ellison Jack’s
own? Why do you think Ellison offers information about
her level of literacy and knowledge of the Bible?
Ellison Jack, 11-years-old girl coal-bearer at Loanhead
Colliery, Scotland: I have been working below three years
on my father’s account; he takes me down at two in the
morning, and I come up at one and two next afternoon. I
go to bed at six at night to be ready for work next morning:
the part of the pit I bear in the seams are much on the
edge. I have to bear my burthen up four traps, or ladders,
before I get to the main road which leads to the pit bottom.
My task is four or five tubs; each tub holds 4G cwt. I fill five
tubs in twenty journeys.
I have had the strap when I did not do my bidding. Am
very glad when my task is wrought, as it sore fatigues. I can
read, and was learning the writing; can do a little; not been
at school for two years; go to kirk occasionally, over to
Lasswade: don’t know much about the Bible, so long since
read.
R. H. Franks, Esq., the sub-commissioner: A brief description of this child’s place of work will illustrate her evidence. She has first to descend a nine-ladder pit to the first
rest, even to which a shaft is sunk, to draw up the baskets
or tubs of coals filled by the bearers; she then takes her
creel (a basket formed to the back, not unlike a cockle-shell
flattened towards the neck, so as to allow lumps of coal to
rest on the back of the neck and shoulders), and pursues
her journey to the wall-face, or as it is called here, the room
of work. She then lays down her basket, into which the coal
is rolled, and it is frequently more than one man can do to
lift the burden on her back. The tugs or straps are placed
over the forehead, and the body bent in a semicircular
form, in order to stiffen the arch.
“Child Labor in the Coal Mines,” Testimony to the Parliamentary
Investigative Committee (1842).
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
INDUSTRY AND THE ENVIRONMENT
The Industrial Revolution changed the
landscape of Britain. Small villages
grew into vast metropolises seemingly
overnight. The rates of growth were
absolutely staggering: in 1801, there
were 75,000 people in Manchester; by
1851, the number had more than
quadrupled. The unremitting boom in
population did more than strain the
resources of local authorities: it broke
them apart. It was not that the new industrial cities were unplanned; they
were beyond the capacity of planning.
Every essential requirement for human
survival became scarce and expensive.
Shortages of food, water, and basic accommodation were commonplace.
Shantytowns sprang up wherever
space would allow, making the flimsily
built habitations of construction
profiteers
seem
like
palaces. There
was
loud
complaint
about those
nineteenthcentury ripoff artists, but in truth the need for
housing was so desperate that people
willingly lived anywhere that provided
shelter. Houses were built back to back
and side by side, with only narrow alleyways to provide sunlight and air. In
Edinburgh, one could step through the
window of one house into the window
of the adjoining one. Whole families
occupied single rooms where members
slept as others worked, in shifts. In
Liverpool, more than 38,000 people
A
CLOSER
LOOK
were estimated to be living in cellars—
windowless underground accommodations that flooded with the rains and
the tides.
Most cities lacked both running water and toilet facilities. Districts were
provided with either pumps or capped
pipes through which private companies ran water for a few hours each day.
The water was collected in buckets and
brought to the home, where it would
stand for the rest of the day and serve
indifferently for washing, drinking,
and cooking. Outhouse toilets were an
extravagant luxury; in one Manchester
district, 33 outhouses had to accommodate 7095 people. They were a
mixed blessing even in the middle-class
districts where they were more plentiful, as there was no system of drainage
to flush away the waste. It simply accumulated in cesspools, which were emptied manually about every two years.
The thing that most impressed visitors
as they approached an industrial city
was the smoke; what impressed them
most when they arrived was the smell.
The quality of life experienced by
most of the urban poor who lived in the
squalid conditions has been recorded by
a number of contemporary observers.
Friedrich Engels was a German socialist
who was sent to England to learn the
cotton trade. He lived in Manchester for
two years and spent much of his time
exploring the working-class areas of the
city. “In this district I found a man, apparently about sixty years old, living in a
cow stable,” Engels recounted from one
of his walking tours in The Condition of
the Working Class in England in 1844.
“He had constructed a sort of chimney
for his square pen, which had neither
windows, floor, nor ceiling, had obtained a bedstead and lived there,
though the rain dripped through his rotten roof. This man was too old and weak
for regular work, and supported himself
by removing manure with a hand-cart;
the dung-heaps lay next door to his
palace!” From his own observations
Engels concluded that “in such dwellings
only a physically degenerate race, robbed
of all humanity, degraded, reduced
morally and physically to bestiality,
could feel comfortable and at home.”
And as he was quick to point out, his
own observations were no different
from those of parliamentary commissioners, medical officers, or civic authorities who had seen the conditions firsthand.
Among the observers, the most influential by far was Sir Edwin Chadwick,
who began his government career as a
commissioner for the poor law and
ended it as the founder of a national system of public health. Chadwick wrote
the report of a parliamentary commission, The Sanitary Condition of the
Laboring Population of Britain (1842),
which caused a sensation among the
governing classes. Building on the work
of physicians, overseers of the poor, and
the most technical scholarship available,
Chadwick not only painted the same
grim picture of urban life as Engels did,
he proposed a comprehensive solution
to one of its greatest problems, waste
management.
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
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ISBN 0-558-43641-2
Chadwick was a civil servant, and he believed that
problems were solved by government based on the conclusions of experts. He had heard
doctors argue their theories
about the causes of disease,
some believing in fluxes that
resulted from combinations of
foul air, water, and refuse; others believing disease was spread
by the diseased, in this case
Irish immigrants who settled in
the poorest parts of English industrial towns. Although medical research had not yet detected the existence of germs, it
was widely held that lack of
ventilation, stagnant pools of
water, and the accumulation of ■ Drawings of workers constructing London’s sanitation system.
human and animal waste in
proximity to people’s dwellings
pipes that would carry the waste to
running water piped through the sysall contributed to the increasing incinearby farms.
tem. Traditionally, only heavy raindence of disease. Chadwick fixed upon
Chadwick’s vision took years to imstorms cleared the waste ditches in most
the last element as crucial. Not even in
plement. He had all of the zeal of a recities, and those were too infrequent to
middle-class districts was there any efformer and none of the tact of a politibe effective. The river had to be the befective system for the removal of waste.
cian. He offended nearly everyone with
ginning of the sewerage system as well as
Chamber pots and primitive toilets were
whom he came into contact, because he
its end. River water had to be pumped
emptied into ditches, which were used to
believed that his program was the only
through an underground construction
drain rain off into local waterways. The
of sewage pits that were built to facilitate
workable one and because he believed
few underground sewers that existed
that it had to be implemented whatever
the water’s flow. Civil engineers had alwere square containers without outlets
the price. He was uninterested in who
ready demonstrated that pits with
that were simply emptied once filled.
was to pay the enormous costs of laying
rounded rather than angular edges were
Chadwick’s vision was for a sanitation
underground tunnels and building
far more effective, and Chadwick advosystem, one that would carry waste out
pumping stations and insisted only that
cated the construction of a system of
of the city quickly and deposit it in
the work begin immediately. In the end,
oval-shaped tunnels, built on an incline
outlying fields where it could be used as
he won his point. Sanitation systems bebeneath the city. Water pumped from
fertilizer.
came one of the first great public-works
one part of the river would rush through
Chadwick realized that the key to disprojects of the industrial age.
the tunnels, which would empty into
posing of waste was a constant supply of
641
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
642
Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
rural workers flocked to the cities and Irish peasants emigrated in the hundreds of thousands to work the lowest paid
and least desirable jobs in the factories.
Social Costs. But economic gain had social costs. The first
was the decline of the family as a labor unit. In both agricultural
and early industrial activity, families labored together. Workers
would not move to mill towns without the guarantee of a job for
all members of their families, and initially they could drive a
hard bargain. The early factories preferred family labor to workhouse conscripts, and it was traditional for children to work beside their parents, cleaning, fetching, or assisting in minding the
machines. Children provided an essential part of family income,
and youngest children were the agency of care for infirm parents. Paradoxically, it was agitation for improvement in the conditions of child labor that spelled the end of the family work
unit. At first, young children were barred from the factories and
older ones allowed to work only a partial adult shift. Although
reformers intended that schooling and leisure be substituted for
work, the separation of children from parents in the workplace
ultimately made possible the substitution of teenagers for
adults, especially as machines replaced skilled human labor. The
individual worker now became the unit of labor, and during
economic downturns it was adult males with their higher
salaries who were laid off first.
The decline of the family as a labor unit was matched by
other changes in living conditions when rural dwellers migrated
to cities. Many rural habits were unsuited to both factory work
and urban living. The tradition of “Saint Monday,” for example,
was one that was deeply rooted in the pattern of agricultural life.
Little effort was expended at the beginning of the work week
and progressively more at the end. Sunday leisure was followed
by Monday recovery, a slow start to renewed labor. The factory
demanded constant application six days a week. Strict rules were
enforced to keep workers at their stations and their minds on
their jobs. More than efficiency was at stake. Early machines
were not only crude, they were dangerous, with no safety features to cover moving parts. Maiming accidents were common
in the early factories, and they were the fault of both workers
and machines. Similarly, industrial workers entered a world of
the cash economy. Most agricultural workers were used to being
paid in kind and to barter exchange. Money was an unusual luxury that was associated with binges of food, drink, and frivolities, which made adjustment to the wage packet as difficult as
adjustment to the clock. Cash had to be set aside for provisions,
rent, and clothing. On the farm, the time of a bountiful harvest
was the time to buy durable goods; in the factory, “harvest time”
was always the same.
Such adjustments were not easy, and during the course of the
nineteenth century a way of life passed forever from England.
For some, its departure caused profound sorrow; for others, it
was a matter of rejoicing. A vertically integrated society in which
lord of the manor, village worthies, independent farmers, workers, and servants lived together interdependently was replaced
by a society of segregated social classes. By the middle decades of
the nineteenth century, a class of capitalists and a class of workers had begun to form and had begun to clash. The middle
classes abandoned the city centers, building exclusive suburban
■
Dudley Street, Seven Dials,
London, by Gustave Doré,
depicts life in the London
slums of the early nineteenth
century.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
643
The Industrialization of the Continent
communities in which to raise their children and insulate their
families. Conditions in the cities deteriorated under the pressure
of overcrowding, lack of sanitation, and the absence of private
investment. The loss of interaction between the different segments of society had profound consequences for the struggle to
improve the quality of life for everyone. Leaders of labor saw
themselves fighting against profits, greed, and apathy; leaders of
capital against drunkenness, sloth, and ignorance. Between the
two stereotypes there was little middle ground.
learning the key industrial secrets that would unlock the prosperity of a new age. The Crystal Palace Exhibition of manufacturing and industry held in London in 1851 was the occasion for
a Continentwide celebration of the benefits of technology and a
chance for ambitious Europeans to measure themselves against
the mighty British. By then many European nations had begun
the transformation of their own economies and had entered a
period of sustained growth.
There was no single model for the industrialization of the
Continental states. Contemporaries continually made comparisons with Britain, but in truth the process of British industrialization was not well suited to any but the coal-rich regions in
Belgium and the Rhineland. Nevertheless, all of Europe benefited from the British experience. No one else had to invent the
jenny, the mule, or the steam engine. Although the British government banned the export of technology, none of the pathbreaking inventions remained a secret for long. Britain had
demonstrated a way to make cheap, durable goods in factories,
and every other state in Europe was able to skip the long stages
of discovery and improvement. Thus, while industrialization began later on the Continent, it could progress more quickly.
THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF
THE CONTINENT
Industrialization
in Europe
Although Britain took the first steps along the road to
an industrial economy, it was not long before other
European nations followed. There was intense interest
in “the British miracle,” as it was dubbed by contemporaries. European ministers, entrepreneurs, even heads
of state visited British factories and mines in hope of
MAP DISCOVERY
St. Petersburg
Navigable rivers
Moscow
Ba
lti
c
Se
a
North
Sea
Canals
Railroads
Bremen
Hamburg
Amsterdam
Rotterdam
Major industrial
centers
Posen
Berlin
Warsaw
Dusseldorf
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
Dresden
Paris
Orléans
Breslau
Lodz
Prague
Strasbourg
Vienna
Nantes
Munich
Pest
Lyon
Milan
Black
Sea
Marseille
Madrid
Barcelona
Rome
Mediterranean
Sea
0
0
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300 Miles
Naples
300 Kilometers
Industrial Revolution on the Continent
What were the least industrial parts of Europe outside of Great Britain? In what directions
did the major railroads run? How did the progress of industrialization in continental Europe
compare with that in Britain? What impact did industrialization have on Spain and Italy?
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
644
Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
France and Germany were building a railroad system within
years of Britain despite the fact that they had to import most of
the technology, raw materials, and engineers.
Britain shaped European industrialization in another way.
Its head start made it very difficult for follower nations to
compete against British commodities in the world market.
Thus European industrialization would be directed first and
foremost to home markets, where tariffs and import quotas
could protect fledgling industries. Although European states
were willing to import vital British products, they placed high
duties on British-made consumer goods and encouraged
higher-cost domestic production. Britain’s competitive advantage demanded that European governments become involved in the industrialization of their countries, financing
capital-intensive industries, backing the railroads, and favoring the establishment of factories.
European industrialization was therefore not the thunderclap it was in Britain. In France, it was a slow, accretive development that took advantage of traditional skills and occupations and gradually modernized the marketplace. In
Germany, industrialization had to overcome the political divisions of the empire, the economic isolation of the petty
states, and the wide dispersion of vital resources. Regions
rather than states industrialized in the early nineteenth century, and parts of Austria, Italy, and Spain imported machinery and techniques and modernized their traditional crafts.
But most of the states and most of the eastern part of Europe
remained tied to a traditional agrarian-based economy that
provided neither labor for industrial production nor purchasing power for industrial goods. The areas quickly became
sources for raw materials and primary products for their industrial neighbors.
France: Industrialization Without Revolution
The Impact of the French Revolution. The consequences of the French Revolution are less clear. Throughout
the eighteenth century, the French economy performed at
least as well as the British, and in many areas better. French
overseas trade had grown spectacularly until checked by military defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). French agriculture steadily increased output, while French rural manufactures flourished. A strong guild tradition still dominated
urban industries, and although it restricted competition and
limited growth, it also helped maintain the standards for the
production of high-quality goods that made French commodities highly prized throughout the world. The Revolution
disrupted every aspect of economic life. Some of its outcomes
were unforeseen and unwelcome. For example, Napoleon’s
Continental System, which attempted to close European markets to Britain, resulted in a shipping war, which the British
won decisively and which eliminated France as a competitor
for overseas trade in the mid-nineteenth century. But other
outcomes were the result of direct policies, even if their impact
could not have been entirely predicted. Urban guilds and corporations were abolished, opening trades to newcomers but
destroying the close-knit groups that trained skilled artisans
and introduced innovative products. Similarly, the breakup of
both feudal and common lands to satisfy the hunger of the
peasantry had the effect of maintaining a large rural population for decades.
Despite the efforts of the central government, there had
been little change in the techniques used by French farmers
over the course of the eighteenth century. French peasants
clung tenaciously to traditional rights that gave even the
smallest landholder a vital say in community agriculture.
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
The experience of France in the nineteenth century demonstrates that there was no single path to industrialization. Each
state blended together its natural resources, historical experiences, and forms of economic organization in unique combinations. While some mixtures resulted in explosive growth, as
in Britain, others made for steady development, as in France.
French industrialization was keyed to domestic rather than
export markets and to the application of new technology to a
vast array of traditional crafts. The French profited, as did all
of the Continental states, from British inventions, but they
also benefited from the distinct features of their own economy. France possessed a pool of highly skilled and highly productive labor, a manufacturing tradition oriented toward the
creation of high-quality goods, and consumers who valued
taste and fashion over cost and function. Thus while the
British dominated the new mass market for inexpensive cottons and cast-iron goods, a market with high sales but low
profit margins, the French were producing luxury items
whose very scarcity kept both prices and profits high. Two decisive factors determined the nature of French industrialization: population growth and the French Revolution.
Slow Growth. From the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, France grew slowly. In 1700, the French population stood at just less than 20 million; in 1850, it was just
less than 36 million, a growth rate of 80 percent. In contrast,
Germany grew 135 percent, from 15 to 34 million, and
England 300 percent, from 5 to 20 million, during the same
period. Nevertheless, France remained the most populous nation in western Europe, second on the Continent only to
Russia. There is no simple explanation for France’s relatively
sluggish population growth. The French had been hit particularly hard by subsistence crises in the seventeenth century, and
there is reliable evidence that the rural population consciously
attempted to limit family size by methods of birth control as
well as by delaying marriages. Moreover, France urbanized
slowly at a time when city dwellers were marrying younger
and producing larger families. As late as the 1860s, a majority
of French workers were farmers. Whatever the cause of the
moderate population growth, its consequences were clear.
France was not pressured by the force of numbers to abandon
its traditional agricultural methods, nor did it face a shortage
of traditional supplies of energy. Except during crop failures,
French agriculture could produce to meet French needs, and
there remained more than enough wood for domestic and industrial use.
The Industrialization of the Continent
Landlords were predominantly absentees, less interested in
the organization of their estates than in the dues and taxes
that could be extracted from them. Thus the policies of successive revolutionary governments strengthened the hold of
small peasants on the land. With the abolition of many feudal
dues and with careful family planning, smallholders could
survive and pass a meager inheritance on to their children.
Even prosperous farmers could not grow into the large-scale
proprietors that had enclosed English fields, for little land
came on the market, and many parts of France practiced partible inheritance, which, over time, tended to even out the size
of holdings. French agriculture continued to be organized in
its centuries-old patterns. While it was able to supply the nation’s need for food, it could not release large numbers of
workers for purely industrial activity.
Stages of Industrial Progress. Thus French industrial
growth was constrained on the one hand by the relatively
small numbers of workers who could engage in manufacturing and on the other by the fact that a large portion of the
population remained subsistence producers, cash-poor, and
linked only to small rural markets. Throughout the eighteenth century, the French economy continued to be regionally segregated rather than nationally integrated. The size of
the state inhibited a highly organized internal trade, and there
was little improvement of the infrastructure of transportation. Although some British-style canals were built, canals in
Britain were built to move coal rather than staple goods, and
France did not have much coal to move. Manufacturing con-
cerns were still predominantly family businesses whose primary markets were regional rather than international. Roads
that connected the short distances between producers and
consumers were of greater importance to the producers than
arterial routes that served the markets of others. Similarly,
there was no national capital market until the mid-nineteenth
century, and precious few regional ones. French producers
were as thrifty and profit-oriented as any others, but they
found it more difficult to raise the large amounts of capital
necessary to purchase the most expensive new machinery and
build the most up-to-date factories. Ironworks, coal mines,
and railroads, the three capital-intensive ventures of industrialization, were financed either by government subsidy or by
foreign investment.
All those factors determined the slow, steady pace of
French industrialization. Recovery after 1815 came in fits and
starts. British inventors, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs
were enticed to France to demonstrate new machinery and industrial techniques, but in most places the real engine of
growth was skilled workers’ steady application of traditional
methods. By 1820, only 65 French factories were powered by
steam engines, and even water-powered machinery was uncommon. Industrial firms remained small and were frequently
a combination of putting-out and factory production. It was
not until midcentury that sustained industrial growth became
evident. This was largely the result of the construction of railroads on a national plan, financed in large part by the central
government. Whereas in Britain the railways took advantage
of a national market, in France they created one. They also
Pierre-Denis Martin’s Waterworks
and Aqueduct at Marly makes clear
the transformation of the landscape wrought by the infrastructure of industry in eighteenthcentury France.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
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Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
646
Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
gave the essential stimulation to the modernization of the iron
industry, in which much refining was still done with charcoal
rather than coke; of machine making; and of the capital markets. Imported iron and foreign investment were vital ingredients in a process that took several decades to reach fruition.
The disadvantages of being on the trailing edge of economic change were mitigated for a time by conventional practices of protectionism. Except in specialty goods, agricultural
produce, and luxury products, French manufactures could
not compete with either British or German commodities. Had
France maintained its position as a world trader, the comparative disadvantage would have been devastating. But defeat in
the wars of commerce had led to a drawing inward of French
economic effort. Marseille and Bordeaux, once bustling centers of European trade, became provincial backwaters in the
nineteenth century. But the internal market was still strong
enough to support industrial growth, and domestic commodities could be protected by prohibitive tariffs, especially
against British textiles, iron, and, ironically, coal. Despite the
fact that France had to import more than 40 percent of its
meager requirements of coal, it still insisted upon slapping
high import duties on British supplies. That was in part to
protect French mine owners, who had never integrated their
operations with iron production and therefore had no interest
in keeping fuel costs low. Moreover, the slow pace of French
industrialization allowed for the skipping of intermediate
stages of development. France had hardly entered the canal
age when it began to build its railways. Ultimately, industry
moved from hand power to steam power in one long step.
While France achieved industrialization without an industrial revolution, it also achieved economic growth within the
context of its traditional values. Agriculture may not have
modernized, but the ancient village communities escaped the
devastation modernization would bring. The orderly progression of generations of farming families characterized rural
France until the shattering experiences of the Franco-Prussian
War (1870) and World War I (1914–1918). Nor did France experience the mushroom growth of new cities with all of their
problems of poverty, squalor, and homelessness. Slow population growth ameliorated the worst of the social diseases of industrialization while traditional rural manufacturing softened
the transformation of a way of life. If France did not reap the
windfall profits of the Industrial Revolution, neither did it
harvest the bitter crop of social, economic, and spiritual impoverishment that was pulled in its train.
Germany: Industrialization and Union
Agriculture. Most of imperial Germany was agricultural
land suited to a diversity of uses. The mountainous regions of
Bavaria and the Austrian alpine communities practiced animal husbandry; there was a grain belt in Prussia, where the
soil was poor but the land plentiful, and one in central
Germany in which the soil was fertile and the land densely occupied. The Rhine Valley was one of the richest in all of
Europe and was the center of German wine production. The
introduction of the potato was the chief innovation of the
eighteenth century. While English farmers were turning farms
into commercial estates, German peasants were learning how
to make do with less land.
Agricultural estates were organized differently in different
parts of Germany. In the east, serfdom still prevailed. Peasants
were tied to the land and its lord and were responsible for labor service during much of the week. Methods of cultivation
were traditional, and neither peasants nor lords had much incentive to adopt new techniques. The vast agricultural domains of the Prussian Junkers, as those landlords were called,
were built on the backs of cheap serf labor, and the harvest
was destined for the Baltic export trade, where world grain
prices rather than local production costs would determine
profits. In central Germany, the long process of commuting
labor service into rents was nearly completed by the end of
the eighteenth century. The peasantry was not yet free, as a series of manorial relationships still tied them to the land, but
they were no longer mere serfs. Moreover, western Germany
was dominated by free farmers who either owned or leased
their lands and who had a purely economic relationship with
their landlords. The restriction of peasant mobility in much
of Germany posed difficulties for the creation of an industrial
work force. As late as 1800, more than 80 percent of the
German population was engaged in agriculture, a proportion
that would drop slowly over the next half century.
Although Germany was well endowed with natural resources and skilled labor in a number of trades, it had not
taken part in the expansion of world trade during the seventeenth century, and the once bustling Hanseatic ports had
been far outdistanced by the rise of the Atlantic economies.
The principal exported manufacture was linen, which was expertly spun and woven in Saxony and the Prussian province
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
The process of industrialization in Germany was dominated
by the historic divisions of the empire of the German peoples.
Before 1815, there were more than 300 separate jurisdictional
units within the empire, and after 1815 there were still more
than 30. Those included large advanced states such as Prussia,
Austria, and Saxony as well as small free cities and the personal enclaves of petty nobles who had guessed right during
the Napoleonic wars. Political divisions had more than politi-
cal impact. Each state clung tenaciously to its local laws and
customs, which favored its citizens over outsiders. Merchants
who lived near the intersection of separate jurisdictions could
find themselves liable for several sets of tolls to move their
goods and several sets of customs duties for importing and
exporting them. The tolls and duties would have to be paid in
different currencies at different rates of exchange according to
the different regulations of each state. Small wonder that
German merchants exhibited an intense localism, preferring
to trade with members of their own state and supporting
trade barriers against others. Such obstacles had a depressing
effect on the economies of all German states but pushed with
greatest weight against the manufacturing regions of Saxony,
Silesia, and the Rhineland.
The Industrialization of the Continent
of Silesia. The linen industry was organized traditionally, with
a mixture of domestic production managed on the puttingout system and some factory spinning, especially after the introduction of British mechanical innovations. But even the
most advanced factories were still being powered by water,
and thus they were located in mountainous regions where
rapidly running streams could turn the wheels. In the 1840s
there were only 22 steam-driven spinning mills in Germany,
several of them established by the Prussian government,
which imported British machines and technicians to run
them. Neither linens nor traditional German metal crafts
could compete on the international markets, but they could
find a wider market within Germany if only the problems of
political division could be resolved.
The Zollverein. The problems of political division were especially acute for Prussia after the reorganization of European
boundaries in 1815 (see Chapter 22). Prussian territory included the coal- and iron-rich Rhineland provinces, but a
number of smaller states separated those areas from Prussia’s
eastern domain. Each small state exacted its own tolls and customs duties whenever Prussian merchants wanted to move
goods from one part of Prussia to the other. Such movement
became more common in the nineteenth century as German
manufacturing began to grow in step with its rising population. Between 1815 and 1865, the population of Germany
grew by 60 percent to more than 36 million people. It was an
647
enormous internal market, nearly as large as the population of
France, and the Prussians resolved to make it a unified trading
zone by creating a series of alliances with smaller states known
as the Zollverein (1834). The Zollverein was not a free-trade
zone, as was the British Empire, but rather a customs union in
which member states adopted the liberal Prussian customs
regulations. Every state was paid an annual portion of receipts
based upon its population, and every state—except Prussia—
increased its revenues as a result. The crucial advantage the
Prussians received was the ability to move goods and materials
from east to west, but Prussia reaped political profits as well. It
forced Hanover and Saxony into the Zollverein and kept its
powerful rival Austria out. Prussia’s economic union soon
proved to be the basis for the union of the German states.
The creation of the Zollverein was vital to German industrialization. It permitted the exploitation of natural advantages,
such as plentiful supplies of coal and iron, and it provided a basis for the building of railroads. Germany was a follower nation
in the process of industrialization. It started late and it self-consciously modeled its success on the British experience. British
equipment and engineers were brought to Germany to attempt
to plant the seeds of an industrial economy. German manufacturers sent their children to England to learn the latest techniques in industrial management. Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)
worked in a Manchester cotton factory, where he observed the
appalling conditions of the industrial labor force and wrote The
Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845). Steam
THE SLAVERY OF LABOR
Although born in Germany, Friedrich Engels witnessed industrialization in England firsthand. His father owned a factory in Manchester of which Engels was put in charge. By day he oversaw industrial production, and by night he wandered the city streets overwhelmed by the suffering of the working classes. His analysis of industrialization developed
from his own observations. He became first a socialist and then, with Karl Marx, a founder of the Communist party.
Focus Questions
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
Why is capital “the all-important weapon in the class war”?
Why does Engels view wage labor as a kind of slavery?
Capital is the all-important weapon in the class war. Power
lies in the hands of those who own, directly or indirectly,
foodstuffs and the means of production. The poor, having
no capital, inevitably bear the consequences of defeat in the
struggle. Nobody troubles about the poor as they struggle
helplessly in the whirlpool of modern industrial life. The
working man may be lucky enough to find employment, if
by his labour he can enrich some member of the middle
classes. But his wages are so low that they hardly keep body
and soul together. If he cannot find work, he can steal, unless
he is afraid of the police; or he can go hungry and then the
police will see to it that he will die of hunger in such a way as
not to disturb the equanimity of the middle classes. . . .
The only difference between the old-fashioned slavery
and the new is that while the former was openly acknowledged the latter is disguised. The worker appears to be free,
because he is not bought and sold outright. He is sold
piece-meal by the day, the week, or the year. Moreover he is
not sold by one owner to another, but he is forced to sell
himself in this fashion. He is not the slave of a single individual, but of the whole capitalist class. As far as the worker
is concerned, however, there can be no doubt as to his
servile status. It is true that the apparent liberty which the
worker enjoys does give him some real freedom. Even this
genuine freedom has the disadvantage that no one is responsible for providing him with food and shelter. His real
masters, the middle-class capitalists, can discard him at any
moment and leave him to starve, if they have no further use
for his services and no further interest in his survival. . . .
From Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England
in 1844 (1845).
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
648
Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
engines were installed in coal mines, if not in factories, and the
process of puddling revolutionized ironmaking, though most
iron was still smelted with charcoal rather than coke. Although
coal was plentiful in Prussia, it was found at the eastern and
western extremities of Germany. Even with the lowering of tolls
and duties, it was still too expensive to move over rudimentary
roads and an uncompleted system of canals.
Thus the railroads were the key to tapping the industrial
potential of Germany. There they were a cause rather than a
result of industrialization. The agreements hammered out in
the creation of the Zollverein made possible the planning necessary to build single lines across the boundaries of numerous
states. Initially, German railroads were financed privately,
with much foreign investment. But ultimately governments
saw the practical advantages of rail transport and took an active part in both planning and financing the system. More
than a quarter of the track constructed in Prussia before 1870
was owned directly by the government, and most of the rest
had been indirectly financed by the government, which purchased land and guaranteed interest on stock issues.
Germany imported most of its engines directly from Britain
and thus adopted standard British gauge for its system. As early
as 1850 there were more than 3500 miles of rail in Germany,
with important roads linking the manufacturing districts of
Saxony and the coal and iron deposits of the Ruhr. Twenty
years later, Germany was second only to Britain in the amount
of track that had been laid and opened. By then it was no
longer simply a follower. German engineers and machinists,
trained in Europe’s best schools of technology, were turning
out engines and rolling stock second to none. And the railroads
transported a host of high-quality manufactures, especially
durable metal goods that came to carry the most prestigious
trademark of the late nineteenth century: “Made in Germany.”
The Lands That Time Forgot
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
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Nothing better demonstrates the point that industrialization
was a regional rather than a national process than a survey of
those states that did not develop industrial economies by the
middle of the nineteenth century. The states ranged from the
Netherlands, which was still one of the richest areas in
Europe, to Spain and Russia, which were the poorest. Also included were Austria-Hungary, the states of the Italian peninsula, and Poland. In all those nations there was some industrial progress. The Bohemian lands of Austria contained a
highly developed spinning industry; the Spanish province of
Catalonia produced more cotton than did Belgium, and the
Basque region was rich in iron and coal. Northern Italy mechanized its textile production, particularly silk spinning, while
in the regions around both Moscow and Saint Petersburg, factories were run on serf labor. Nevertheless, the economies of
all the states remained nonindustrial and, with the exception
of the Netherlands, dominated by subsistence agriculture.
There were many reasons why the states were unable to develop their industrial potential. Some, such as Naples and
Poland, were simply underendowed with resources; others,
such as Austria-Hungary and Spain, faced difficulties of transport and communications that could not easily be overcome.
Spain’s modest resources were located on its northern and
eastern edges, while a vast, arid plain dominated the center. To
move raw materials and finished products from one end of
the country to the other was a daunting task, made more difficult by lack of waterways and the rudimentary condition of
Spanish roads. Two-thirds of Austria-Hungary was either
mountains or hills, a geographic feature that presented obstacles not even the railroads could easily solve. But there was far
more than natural disadvantage behind the failure of those
parts of Europe to move in step with the industrializing states.
Their social structure, agricultural organization, and commercial policies all hindered the adoption of new methods,
machines, and modes of production.
Despite the fact that industrialization created new and
largely unmanageable social problems, the follower states
were eager for its benefits. All imported the latest products of
technology, and the ruling elites in even the most traditional
economies lived a material life similar to those in the most advanced. British entrepreneurs and artisans were courted by
heads of state and their ministers and were offered riches in
exchange for their precious knowledge. British industrialists
set up textile factories in Moscow, built spinning machines in
Bohemia, and taught Spanish miners how to puddle iron.
Railroad pioneer George Stephenson himself surveyed the
prospect of creating a passenger rail system in Spain, though
he concluded pessimistically, “I have not seen enough people
of the right sort to fill a single train.” In the later part of the
nineteenth century, French, Belgian, and German industrialists served similar roles. There were no traditional economies
by choice. Industrialization was seen as a miracle, and the
latecomers worshiped avidly at its shrine.
It was work rather than faith that would produce economic
salvation. The most common characteristic of the latecomers
was a traditional agrarian structure that consumed the lion’s
share of labor and capital while producing little surplus for
any but a small dominant class. In areas as dissimilar as Spain,
Italy, and Russia, agriculture was organized in vast estates,
which kept the mass of peasants perpetually poor.
Sharecropping systems in the west and serfdom in the east differed only in formal organization. Both conditions made it impossible for peasants to accumulate the land necessary to invest in capital improvements or to send their children to towns
to engage in industrial occupations. In Hungary, Poland, and
Russia, it was illegal for people to change occupations, and
serfs who engaged in industrial activity paid their lords for the
privilege. Although a number of serfs amassed considerable
fortunes in organizing domestic or factory spinning, legal constraints restricted the efforts of potential entrepreneurs.
Similarly, the leaders of traditional economies maintained
tariff systems that insulated their own producers from competition. Austrian tariffs were not only artificially high, they were accompanied by import quotas to keep all but the smallest fraction of foreign products from Austrian consumers. The Spanish
government prohibited the importation of grain, forcing its
The Industrialization of the Continent
eastern provinces to pay huge transport costs for domestic grain
despite the fact that cheaper Italian grain was readily available.
Such policies sapped much needed capital from industrial investment. There were many reasons for so-called protective tariffs, and it was not only the follower states that imposed them.
France and the Zollverein protected domestic industry while
Britain was converted to free trade only in the 1840s. But protection was sensible only when it protected rather than isolated.
Inefficiently produced goods of inferior quality were the chief
results of the protectionist policies of the follower nations.
Failure to adopt steam-powered machines made traditionally
produced linens and silks so expensive that smuggling occurred
on an international scale. Although the goods might find buyers
in domestic markets, they could not compete in international
trade, and one by one the industries of the follower nations atrophied. Such nations became exporters of raw materials and
foodstuffs. The export of Russian linen was replaced by the export of Russian flax. Spain, once the largest exporter of woolen
cloth in Europe, exported mainly wines and fruits. Those
economies that remained traditionally organized came to be exploited for their resources by those that had industrialized.
The international situation was not all that different from
the dual system that came into effect within the nonindustrialized states. In Austria-Hungary, for example, it was Hungary
that was kept from industrializing, first by the continuation of
serf-based agriculture, then by the high internal tariffs that favored Austrian over Hungarian manufactures. In Italy, the division was between north and south. In Lombardy and Tuscany,
machine-based manufacturing took hold alongside mining and
metallurgy; in 1860, northern Italy contained 98 percent of the
railways and 87 percent of the roads that existed on the entire
peninsula. In Naples and Sicily, half-starved peasants eked out a
miserable existence on once-rich soil that had become depleted
from overuse. It was estimated that of the 400,000 people living
in Naples, more than 100,000 were destitute beggars. In Spain,
Catalonia modernized while Castile stagnated. Until the loss of
its Latin American empire in the first half of the nineteenth
century, Spain had a ready market for Catalonian textiles and
handicrafts. But since Castile remained the cultural and administrative center of the state, it did little to encourage change, and
much government policy was actually counterproductive. The
chief problem faced by the dual economies was that neither
part could sustain the other. Traditional agriculture could not
produce the necessary surplus of either labor or capital to support industry, and industry could not economize sufficiently to
make manufactured goods cheap enough for a poor peasantry.
Thus the advantages of being a follower were all missed.
Technology could not be borrowed or stages skipped because
the ground was not prepared for widespread industrial activity
to be cultivated. Even by standing still, followers fell behind.
While over the course of the nineteenth century male illiteracy
dropped dramatically in the industrialized states—to 30 percent in Britain and France and 10 percent in Prussia—it remained at 75 to 80 percent in Spain and Italy and more than 90
percent in Russia. There was more than irony in the fact that
one of the first railroads built on the Continent was built in
Austria but was built to be powered by horses rather than engines. The first railways in Italy linked royal palaces to capital
cities. Those in Spain radiated from Madrid and bypassed
most centers of natural resources. In those states, the railroads
A Russian peasant tills a field with a
primitive horse-drawn wooden plow.
Russian fields produced low yields,
partly because of the use of such
crude farming methods.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
■
649
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
650
Chapter 21 Industrial Europe
were built to move the military rather than passengers or
goods. They were state-financed, occasionally state-owned, and
almost always lost money. They were symbols of the industrial
age, but in those states they were symbols without substance.
CONCLUSION
The industrialization of Europe in the eighteenth century was
an epochal event in human history. The constraints on daily
life imposed by nature were loosened for the first time. No
longer did population growth in one generation mean famine
in the next; no longer was it necessary for the great majority
of people to toil in the fields to earn their daily bread.
Manufacture replaced agriculture as humanity’s primary activity, though the change was longer and slower than the burst
of industrialization that took place in the first half of the
nineteenth century. For the leaders, Britain especially, industrialization brought international eminence. British achievements were envied, British inventors celebrated, Britain’s constitutional and social organization lauded. A comparatively
small island nation had become the greatest economic power
in Europe. Industrialization had profound consequences for
economic life, but its effects ran deeper than that. The search
for new markets would result in the conquest of continents;
the power of productivity unleashed by coal and iron would
result in the first great arms race. Both would reach fruition in
World War I, the first industrial war. For better or worse, the
industrial era that began in Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century continues today.
QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW
1. Why did early manufacturing develop in the countryside,
and what effect did that have on manufacturing practices
and social relations?
2. In what ways were the ideas about organization of manufacturers such as Josiah Wedgwood and Robert Owen as
significant as new technology in the development of industry in Britain?
3. How did British society address some of the changes in
people’s lives that were brought about by industrialization?
4. How did industrialization on the Continent differ from industrialization in England?
5. Why did some nations develop little industry at all?
KEY TERMS
Industrial Revolution, p. 626
Luddites, p.633
mule, p. 632
putting-out system, p. 622
Zollverein, p. 647
You can obtain more information about industrial Europe at
the Websites listed below. See also the Companion Website
that accompanies this text, www.ablongman.com/kishlansky,
which contains an online study guide and additional
resources.
The Industrial Revolution in Britain
Reminiscences of James Watt
www.history.rochester.edu/steam/hart/
A nineteenth-century account of the life of James Watt and
his role as inventor of the steam engine with links to the history of the steam engine.
Women in World History Curriculum: Industrial
Revolution
www.womeninworldhistory.com/lesson7.html
Sponsored by Women in World History Curriculum, this site
details the plight of working women in industrial England.
Child Labour in the 19th Century
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/IRchild.main.htm
This site chronicles child labor in Britain, including life in the
factory and first-hand experiences.
The Industrialization of the Continent
Modern History Sourcebook: Tables Illustrating the
Spread of Industrialization
www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/indrevtabs1.html
Charts and statistics about industrialization in Europe.
Internet Modern History Sourcebook: Industrial
Revolution
www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook14.html
An outstanding collection of documents on the Industrial
Age with links.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
General Reading
T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997). A compelling brief account of the
traditional view of industrialization.
Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the
Modern World, 1700–2000 (New York: Basic Books, 2001). A
transnational history of the role of finance in the making of
the modern world.
Jordan Goodman and Katrina Honeyman, Gainful Pursuits:
The Making of Industrial Europe, 1600–1914 (London:
Edward Arnold, 1988). A brief overview of the entire process
of industrialization.
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
agricultural revolution, p. 620
Crystal Palace
Exhibition, p. 643
enclosure, p. 624
Factory Act (1833), p. 637
industrialization, p. 627
DISCOVERING WESTERN CIVILIZATION
ONLINE
Suggestions for Further Reading
Pat Hudson, The Industrial Revolution (London: Oxford
University Press, 2007). The latest account of the technological innovation that began the modern era.
The Traditional Economy
Richard Brown, Society and Economy in Modern Britain,
1700–1850 (London: Routledge, 1991). A comprehensive
survey.
J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution
(London: Batsford, 1966). The classic survey of the changes
in British agriculture.
The Industrial Revolution in Britain
N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth During the Industrial
Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). A highly
quantitative study by an economic historian arguing the case
that economic growth was slow in the early nineteenth century.
François Crouzet, The First Industrialists (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985). An analysis of the social
background of the first generation of British entrepreneurs.
Martin Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and
Social History of Britain, 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995). The best single-volume survey on the
Industrial Revolution and its effects on British society.
Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution, 2d ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). The best introduction to the technological changes in Britain.
651
Press, 1999). An argument about the nature of British society
in the age of the Industrial Revolution.
John Rule, The Vital Century: England’s Developing Economy,
1714–1815 (London: Longman, 1992). A comprehensive survey of the British economy.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
(New York: Random House, 1966). A brilliant and passionate
study of the ways laborers responded to the changes brought
about by the industrial economy.
The Industrialization of the Continent
W. O. Henderson, The Rise of German Industrial Power
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). A chronological study of German industrialization that centers on
Prussia.
Tom Kemp, Industrialization in Nineteenth-Century Europe,
2d ed. (London: Longman, 1985). Survey of the process of industrialization in the major European states.
Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1981). Argues the regional nature of industrialization
throughout western Europe.
Roger Price, The Economic Transformation of France (London:
Croom Helm, 1975). A study of French society before and
during the process of industrialization.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986). A social history of the
impact of railways, drawn from French and German sources.
Clive Trebilcock, The Industrialization of the Continental
Powers, 1780–1914 (London: Longman, 1981). A complex
study of Germany, France, and Russia.
Richard Price, British Society, 1680–1880: Dynamism,
Containment, and Change (New York: Cambridge University
For a list of additional titles related to this chapter’s topics,
please see http://www.ablongman.com/kishlansky.
ISBN 0-558-43641-2
Judith Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of
Domestic Life in Victorian England (New York: W. W. Norton,
2005). A detailed depiction of homes and families in nineteenth-century England.
Civilization in the West, Seventh Edition, by Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien. Published by Longman. Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.